Writing Cultural History in Colonial and Postcolonial India [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512806458

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Ruse of Progress
1. Liberal Nationalist Histories
2. Radical Nationalist Histories
3. Marxist/Materialist Histories
4. Transitions: Mediation and Irony
5. Subaltern Studies: Radical History in the Metaphoric Mode
6. Conclusion: Irony as Tragedy
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Writing Cultural History in Colonial and Postcolonial India

CRITICAL HISTORIES David Ludden, Series Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Writing Cultural History in Colonial and Postcolonial India Henry Schwarz

PENN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 1997 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6097 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schwarz, Henry. Writing cultural history in colonial and postcolonial India / Henry Schwarz. p. cm. — (Critical histories) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8122-3373-5 (alk. paper) 1. India—Civilization—1765-1947. 2. India—Civilization—19473. Social change—India. I. Title. II. Series. DS428.S93 1997 9S4-dc2i 97-2875 CIP

World history has not always existed; history as world history a result. —KARL MARX,

Grundrisse

Indeed it is a difficult business this timekeeping. Nothing more quickly disorders it than contact with any of the arts. —VIRGINIA WOOLF,

Orlando

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The Ruse of Progress 1. Liberal Nationalist Histories

29

2. Radical Nationalist Histories

62

3. Marxist/Materialist Histories

76

4. Transitions: Mediation and Irony

i

105

5. Subaltern Studies: Radical History in the Metaphoric Mode 128 6. Conclusion: Irony as Tragedy Notes

171

Bibliography Index

197

187

162

Acknowledgments

of this type, one incurs innumerable debts of hospitality and insight. They can hardly be repayed, but mentioning them opens new avenues for credit and exchange. Fredric Jameson's generosity and inspiration mark every one of these pages. His openness to new forms of research allowed this project to emerge in a form very different from its original conception. I am grateful to have had his example before me as thinker, teacher, mentor, and friend. The idea of writing a history of histories first truly struck home under the influence of V. Y. Mudimbe. Tony Stewart, Satti Khanna, and Richard Fox read this work attentively and criticized it thoroughly when it was not even a dream of a book. Other teachers and mentors who had no idea what would come of their example, but who have marked this work anyway, include Stanley Fish, Franco Moretti, Robert Weimann, Terry Eagleton, Lawrence Kritzman, and John Fizer. I N A CROSS-CULTURAL P R O J E C T

Ranajit Guha first encouraged me to think of a history of Indian history. His personal and professional inspiration have made possible my subsequent research. Partha Chatterjee considerably eased the bureaucratic obstacles to studying in India and supported this manuscript in its early stages. My thanks to him and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, for their institutional support and hospitality. While affiliated with the Centre I profited from discussions with Ashok Sen, A. K. Bagchi, and especially Satyajit Dasgupta, who displayed great equanimity throughout the course of my initial stumblings. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Samik Bandyopadhyay each provided crucial institutional support at important times, and graciously allowed me to watch them work. Tarun Mitra at the American Institute of Indian Studies, Calcutta, was a generous host. Hena Basu provided invaluable research, bibliography, and translation support.

X

Acknowledgments

Several professors at Jadavpur University contributed in various ways. Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Amiya Deb, Subhir Raychaudhuri, Manobendra Bandyopadhyay, and Jashodhara Bagchi were all involved in various stages of the argument. The National Library, Calcutta, was an invaluable resource, as was the Rush Rhees Library at Rochester University. My close friends in Calcutta, Samik Ghosh, Ipshita Chanda, Raj at Bose, and Swagato Ganguli, all encouraged, entertained, fed, and otherwise propped up a rather strange enterprise. I am grateful to Nabarun Bhattacharya for regular lessons in kisti, and to Tinu and Bou for their sustenance and friendship. Pijush Chatterjee made things work; Timir Basu made them worth doing. Gopi Singh Deo, Proshonto Rakshit, and the Kheria Sabar of Rajnowagarh District asked the questions of the future. I am also grateful to Father Gaston Roberge of Chitrabcmi, and to Nirmal Ghosh. Ritu Vig, Kevin Meehan, Supriya Nair, Paul Rosier, and Patricia O'Connor read and commented on various parts of the manuscript. As always, Richard Dienst is my best critic. David Ludden and two anonymous reviewers helped shape the finished product. My thanks for their attention. Support from the James P. Duke International Studies Fellowship and from Georgetown University was instrumental to both the undertaking and the completion of this work. I would also like to thank Mindy Brown, Patricia Smith, and the staff of the University of Pennsylvania Press for their kind and unwavering attention. Many friends and scholars in Washington and elsewhere have helped sustain the energy of this project and others. Without the camaraderie and comfort of Mustapha Kamal Pasha, Ritu Vig, Sangeeta Ray, Sandy and Eliot Mills, Lalitha Gopalan, Michael Ragussis, and Peter Hulme it would have been hard to think of anything getting done. Without my parents, Henry J. and Maureen P. Schwarz, indeed nothing would have gotten done. And without Richard and Paul, Mahasweta and Molly, it wouldn't have been half as much fun.

Introduction: The Ruse of Progress

[E]ven though the most developed languages have laws and characteristics in common with the least developed, nevertheless, just those things which determine their development, i.e. the elements which are not general and common, must be separated out from the determinations valid for production as such, so that in their unity—which arises already from the identity of the subject, humanity, and of the object, nature—their essential difference is not forgotten. The whole profundity of those modern economists [or scholars in general] who demonstrate the eternity and harmoniousness of the existing social relations lies in this forgetting. —KARL MARX,

Grundrisse

[RJationalist, evolutionist, progressivist ideas had a decisive impact on nationalist thought in one of its characteristic drives—namely, its insistence on reclaiming the Indian past. Historiography was one of the two principal instruments—the other being literature—which would henceforth be put to increasingly vigorous use for such reclamation. —RANAJIT GUHA

A s M A R X O B S E R V E D E A R L Y I N H I S L I F E , a n d n o m o r e provocatively than in the scattered speculations collected as the

Grundrisse,

capitalism is simultaneously the unifying global logic o f the m o d e r n w o r l d and the very engine of difference. T h u s history f o r the first time b e c o m e s a properly " w o r l d " history only in the era o f capitalist development, and as I will argue here, tracing the minutest o f "essential differences" in a particular instance o f the u n f o l d i n g o f w o r l d history,

2

Introduction

it should not be possible to write the history of a particular place or time without invoking the worldliness that has come into being since the sixteenth century. Colonialism and imperialism are the most dramatic examples of this "worlding" of the world, and the creation of modern colonial literatures is perhaps its most sensitive expression. The history of colonial literature thus marks the emergence of world history as possibility; the history of that history is the instantiation of world history as "result." Although the rest of my book is more modest in scope, it does attempt to take seriously the often-stated claim that Bengali literature, in Sukumar Sen's i960 phrase, forced the "recognition of contemporary India as an equal partner in the assembly of the men of letters of the free and progressive world" (70). Since Bengali literature still has not attained such status in the English-speaking world, I have attempted to assess some of the history behind this Utopian affirmation, to examine what impulses would make Bengali literature want to be a "partner" of the world, and to analyze the ideological operations by which the world could seem "free and progressive" from the vantage of a colonial and postcolonial past. For, a much as it has participated in the unity of world history Marx speaks of, colonial and postcolonial Bengal has always been forced to participate unequally. In the writing of cultural history, however, this inequality could seem to be transcended, and thus this record forms one of the most remarkable documents of struggle of our time.

I This book begins from a fairly straightforward premise. Inspired largely by Ranajit Guha's suggestion that the practice of history writing in colonial India was an act of cultural resistance to British rule, I decided to investigate how this writing back was worked out within the field I knew best, literary studies. More importantly, I sought to deduce what relevance the writing of Indian literary and cultural history—and the history of that history—might have for emancipatory cultural movements within India during the period since Indepen-

The Ruse of Progress

3

dence. I have tried to determine here how the modifiers "literary" and "cultural" affected the anticolonial practice of Indian historiography. I was not surprised to find that, just as Guha observed, a significant rebuttal of Britain's right to rule India was played out in the content of literary histories. This content took many shapes and ran the gamut of political opinion, from left radicalism to religious conservatism. In almost no case did I detect any tacit endorsement of English rule in Bengali literary history. The very act of writing history in colonial India indeed posed a direct challenge to the representations of the past that had been claimed by the nation's rulers. In form, however, I discovered that the wide range of styles, genres, periodizations, and other structures mobilized in the writing of cultural history actually did seem to reproduce to a great extent the basic assumptions of European historiography. Contrary to the claims of those theorists of postcolonial criticism for whom resistance is only registered in fragments, I found that what Guha called the "rationalist, evolutionist, progressivist ideas" explicitly borrowed from European history writing "had a decisive impact on nationalist thought." Far from rejecting outright the teleological trajectories of European Enlightenment history, which placed Europe at the pinnacle of world civilization, Indian historians often borrowed Western patterns wholesale, even occasionally concurring that modern Indian civilization was immature and that its progress was inextricably linked to its increasing Westernization. Did this mean that Indian historians had won back their past only to reduce it to another version of Europe's history? Had they fallen prey to the "cunning of reason" described at the end of Partha Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, merely substituting a particular and limited sovereignty for the universal unfolding of a larger logic of domination? In an old ruse common to anticolonial movements worldwide, the forms taken by resistance seemed to betray their intentions; by assuming the forms of European historiography in order to contest history's pretensions to having captured "reality," Indian writers seemed to fall prey to the larger aims of colonization by reproducing the very narratives and ideologies that had stolen their

4

Introduction

past. How much of a liberation could this be? Indeed, the refrain of liberal British colonizers since the 1830s had been that they were educating India for its eventual freedom.1 In a dilemma familiar to other anticolonial movements, the struggle to end oppression seemed to create new forms of oppression: in this case, the struggle to reclaim history ended by validating the English version of History. The story is, however, much more complicated. Bengali literary historiography does not reproduce the basic assumptions of European history writing, even when superficially reproducing its structures. In many cases Bengali literary historiography may seem to adhere to European models, but when read more attentively and comprehensively the seeming adherence belies much more complicated negotiations between Indian and European culture at the level of form. Of course India imbibed a great deal of European thought during its two-hundred-year colonization by the English. A great many of the cultural historians examined here will assert the benefits of that long-term acculturation, even as relatively few of them admit that India should have been dominated economically, militarily, and socially by the West. This paradox of implicit resistance within a tacit admiration for Western norms is reflected in the seeming reproduction of Western narrative styles in the subcontinent. When they sought to do so, Indian historians proved themselves fully equal to the task of meeting or exceeding Western standards of historiographical accuracy. In remarkably few cases of cultural history writing in India, however, do we find an unproblematic fit between European standards of historiography and the Indian authors and their material. Acculturation is a far more complicated plot than its reduction to mimicry would imply. The term "mimicry" itself, as reconfigured by creative writers and theorists such as V. S. Naipaul and Homi K. Bhabha, illustrates some of the insuperable differences between form and content, major and minor, center and periphery that the Indian appropriation of European historiographical form describes. The distinction between form and content turns out not to be of major importance. The more important contrast is the subtle but crucial distinction between what constitutes "acceptable" historio-

The Ruse of Progress

5

graphical form in the West and how many ways there are to extend, match, contest, and finally redeploy that form. Bengali cultural history is rarely in a position of parasitic dependency on the repressive myths of European colonial history, nor is it another version of hegemonic Eurocentrism. It is, to resituate the title of a respected U.S. academic journal, a new literary history. Arguments about form and content in the colonial situation that assert an unproblematic synonymy between formal mimicry and continued domination crucially underplay the importance of context in deducing the ideological content of any particular form. According to Hayden White, one of the most authoritative critics on European history writing of the nineteenth century, the major writers of European history were capable of producing a rather limited range of formal combinations in their search for the rhetorical consistency that resulted in the realism that European historiographical description eventually elevated to its current position of academic respectability. White classifies these forms into four dominant categories that he labels argument, mode of emplotment, ideological implication, and trope. While one could imagine all sorts of recombinations between these elements—two hundred and fifty-six to be exact!—White asserts that only four ur-combinations generate the proper aura of realist historiographical authority that has become accepted by the academic discipline of history. White's structural analysis of the historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe is also implicitly a history of how the possibilities of historical narrative gradually narrowed into such rigid disciplinary confines; one could read the plot of his structural analysis itself as a story of how the rhetorical elements swirled throughout the nineteenth century in various ways into recipes of combination that eventually solidified to dictate the acceptable modes of historiographical inquiry by the end of the century.2 Bengali cultural history writing began with these European modes almost in place. After three generations of English schooling, the first Bengalis who set out to write cultural histories were fully conversant in these dominant modes. By contrast however, Bengali historiography, while it may have appeared European, seldom if ever

6

Introduction

reproduced the canonical ensembles of combination dominant in the West. Instead, the historians examined here display that fundamental irregularity that White attributes to the "master philosophers of history" in the European tradition—Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche— who strategically violated the codes of acceptable historiography in order to break from them and open up new possibilities for historical narration. Although the writers examined here were not explicidy philosophers of history reflecting theoretically on the processes of historical argumentation, Bengali historians implicidy called into question the acceptability of these modes for the Indian situation as they tried to pour Indian content into the established formal containers of historical discourse. In the process they fashioned a striking revision and counter-tradition to the dominant Western story, one that shadows the historical imagination of nineteenth-century Europe as its guilty alter ego. It is difficult to conceive of an Indian historiographical practice untouched by two hundred years of colonial influence. It is equally implausible now to describe the European historical imagination without considering its repercussions on history writing in those places it dominated economically, militarily, and culturally for two centuries. A collection of White's later essays was called The Content of the Form, in which he showed how formal structures could radically alter the meaning of the manifest content within them. My book could be subtitled "the context of the form," since it tries to measure the complex negotiations that occur at the level of form when one culture engages as deeply and intelligendy as did India's with the imported paradigms of acceptable history writing from Europe. By "context" I do not necessarily mean embedding the appropriation of European forms within a plot of ambient social history that somehow explains why and how these forms were imported and reproduced; rather, I try to demonstrate the retooling of European forms to suit various local purposes at different times, and the tensions to which this activity gives rise. Narrative forms are not neutral containers of content capable of passing back and forth freely between cultures. The very act of transportation, of prescribing European standards of historical style and of attempting tq comply with them, incurs a translation and

The Ruse of Progress

7

a displacement whereby these styles are transformed, adapted, negotiated—and of course often changed utterly—in order to be understood in the target culture. The reciprocal process, that of writing back, further translates form. One could assert, pace theorists of literary translation for whom the content or meaning of an utterance is usually the contested (or mourned for) object, that form and style are even harder to grasp as transcultural constants since they ascribe an almost arbitrary rigidity to the distinctive mode in which a meaning is conveyed rather than its immediate referent. That rigidity, as formal mode, often has little to do with manifest content; historical realism as a style cannot dictate the content of all historiographical works that rely on its basic coordinates to tell their stories. By determining that all "authentic" histories will be written in this particular style, however, realism sets its limits as the mark of "true" history. Once we recognize such formal constraints acting on the most varied types of historical content, we begin to notice the extreme arbitrariness of form, and to wonder how in the world it ever managed to bring itself to this point. At a certain moment in their historical education under colonialism, Bengali historians began to appropriate the laws of European historiographical form. Almost from the beginning of this appropriation, Bengali historians necessarily broke from the European legacy and began to trace their own course of alternate modernization. Their alternate modernity was not free from European influence to the degree that it would always measure its distance from the European agon that set the standards of historical accuracy during the colonial period. Thus Bengali historical modernity is always already a dependent modernity, but it is also a unique modernity. Modern Bengali historiography is one of the most sensitive sites to which we can look for an alternate modernizing impulse that struggles fiercely with outside domination while preserving the specificity of its individual character. In "The Law of Genre," Jacques Derrida begins with a promise framed as an imperative: "I will not mix genres. I repeat: genres are not to be mixed." 3 It is of course an impossible promise, as the generic contract practically guarantees its own violation. This contra-

8

Introduction

dictory admonition can be extended to the notion of acceptable form in historiography. Literary or historiographical form is often seen as an imperative, and indeed in White's story the breaking of acceptable form is accomplished only by "master historians." If it is true to state that historiographical accuracy can only be registered, or authenticated, through a limited number of conventional forms, however, this view in fact disguises the "real theoretical problem" central to any discussion of form. As Raymond Williams observes with characteristic thoroughness, "the concept of form contains a significant ambiguity. From its development in Latin, which was repeated in English, it acquired two major senses: a visible or outward shape and an inherent .shaping impulse. Form thus spans a whole range from the external and superficial to the essential and determining."4 I suggest that this dual nature of form, the fundamental ambiguity at the heart of its definition, is revealed in the Indian appropriation of acceptable historiographical style, which in fact makes manifest the tension that "proper" history attempts to conceal in order to bestow on itself the ring of authenticity. This authentic "realist" tone is typically sounded through objectivity (the lack of personal narration), neutrality (the avoidance of interested positions), empiricism (the recourse to "facts"), temporal distance (resisting "the heat of the moment"), eschewing theory in favor of "common sense," and comprehensive "coverage" rather than symptomatic probes into particular themes. Through such procedures, historians attempt to corner their access to truth by sharply delimiting the multifarious nature of their objects and isolating what is essentially "historical" about them. This is done by conscious juxtaposition to what could be construed as "literary," fictional, personal, partisan, theoretical, contemporaneous, biased, or otherwise partial approaches to events. Thus one could posit the discourses of history and literature as two opposing poles in the discussion of form: history as "truth" embodies the "visible or outward shape" of events, literature as "fiction" the "inherent shaping impulse" that gives rise to them. But literary history presents us with a peculiarly hybrid genre, doubly so when the discourses of both "literature" and "history" have been revealed to be discourses of domination, as they have in the

The Ruse of Progress

9

colony. Is literary history predominantly "literature" or "history"? Just by posing the question the discrete identities of both discourses are opened up and called into question. This questioning immediately returns us to the issue of what constitutes acceptable form, and thus, by implication, the issue of what constitutes the "true" and the mode of its proper narration. Williams situates this question historically, when the neoclassical laws that decreed the inviolability of generic forms, such as in the so-called unities of the eighteenth century, were shaken in the nineteenth century and transformed into a dual concept of form in subsequent poetics. Though Williams does not mention it, it was at precisely this historic moment that the English impulse to extend the benefits of its civilizing mission to India was put into practice. English education in the colony was formalized as policy in 1835, though it had proceeded casually from at least 1800.1 would suggest that the very regulative practices of English education, stressing as they did a preponderantly literary education, but one that emphasized metrics, scansion, rote memorization—in short, literary technics as opposed to hermeneutical depth or interpretation— embodied this contradictory concept of form and instantiated it as an unexplained but nonetheless mandatory training in Englishness. According to Williams's definition, "At its extremes it [the notion of form] is found in neoclassical and academic theories, stressing external characteristics and evident rules by which forms can be distinguished and in which particular works may be found to be perfect or imperfect; and then in romantic theories, in which form is regarded as the unique and specific achievement of a particular vital impulse, all external characteristics and indeed all rules being regarded as irrelevant, at best a mere crust on the dynamic internal formative impulse."5 The full range of this thinking about form can be found in the Bengali literary canon that evolved in the nineteenth century when, after a half-century of fairly widespread education in Western methods of historical and fictional composition, Bengali writers began to incorporate European forms such as the novel in their own literary practices. In effect, they learned to reproduce six hundred years of English literary evolution in three generations, self-consciously mastering the forms contemporary in Europe while

10

Introduction

searching their history for icons who could compete with Chaucer and Shakespeare. The tremendous compression of this learning reveals itself in the formal tensions animating the creative responses of Bengali writers to the law of genre. The exemplar of this tension in the contradictory concept of form was undoubtedly Michael Madhusudan Datta, often called the Milton or Byron of Bengal (a telling slippage), who by 1865 had achieved a high Romantic tone while introducing into the vernacular such disciplined structures as the sonnet, epistle, and ode, the five-act drama, but also blank verse. Michael's monumental poem The Fall of Meghnad \Megh nadbadh Kavya] is an epic of four thousand lines that oscillates between tightly controlled form and a virtuosic subjectivity. Michael's borrowings from and interminglings of both Western conceptions of form (Enlightenment and Romantic) within the same work attests to the condensed learning-time of the modern Bengali tradition, a condensation that resulted in a remarkable simultaneity of aesthetic appropriation in the colony. Genre is both an accepted limit and a boundary to be overcome; the rivalry with European form is both a test to be met and a limit to be transcended. It is not only European form that is appropriated and complexly reproduced here, however; Michael's epic is a direct rewriting of the Sanskrit Ramayana, self-consciously modeled on two later vernacular recensions that gave rise to elaborate traditions of popular performance, the Hindi version of Tulsidas and the Bengali version of Krittibas. To make matters more complex, Michael's dynamic interweaving of "high" Sanskrit epic with "low" vernacular recension and the dual concept of form present in the European nineteenth century is further complicated by his references to a South Indian vernacular tradition in which the epic heros are inverted, as in the Tamil Iramavataram of Kampan. Thus any determination of the formal "adequacy" or "acceptability" of European standards must consider the dense interplay of foreign and indigenous traditions unified but not synthesized within a particularly overdetermined creative matrix. To say at this point that the Bengali cultural system began to appropriate European form should not imply either that Bengali

The Ruse of Progress

il

writing finally began to appreciate the ideal types of some abstract, universal literature only in the later nineteenth century nor that the empirical reproduction of European genres by Indian writers signaled a consensus on the value of certain formal properties in literature or in historiography. The introduction of European form in the colony, I would argue, was a disciplinary gesture initiated by the East India Company in 1835 and later pursued by the crown, designed, as Macaulay memorably stated, to create "a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern." 6 Literary and historiographical form was disseminated through the exclusively Englishlanguage school system supported by the Company until 1854 from its India revenues, the overt purpose of which was to assist in Macaulay's project of Englishing India. Due to various internal developments, however, the Macaulayan system of English education was gradually displaced, superceded in 1854 by the somewhat more efficient project of creating an indigenized version of English culture on Indian soil and in Indian languages. During the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy, Horace Hayman Wilson, the preeminent English Sanskritist of his day, had stated the case for a specifically literary education even more forcefully than Macaulay's opinion that it be administered in English: "It is not by the English language that we can enlighten the people of India," wrote Wilson, "it can be effected only through the forms of speech which they already understand and use. These must be applied to the purpose . . . by the presentation of European facts, opinions, and sentiments, in an original native garb. . . . [We must] give to the people of India a literature of their own, the legitimate progeny of that of England, the living resemblance, though not the servile copy, of its parent." 7 John Stuart Mill, the great English theorist of individual liberty, at the time endorsed this position from his seat in India House. To achieve success within the English-run administration, Mill argued, English-educated Indians would indeed be required to reproduce English form, not through the English language alone but in the guise of vernacular literatures explicidy tailored after the English model. This internalized reproduction of English knowledge in the vernacular would guarantee the true assimilation of European

12

Introduction

ideas; it would determine equally the condition of native promotion and the sign of native trustworthiness. Thus loaded with power, literary or historical form in the colonial context could never be a matter of subjective expression or disinterested contemplation, much less a neutral recording of facts. Literary and historical form were always already material in that their reproduction implied a certain acquiescence to European domination. The discourses of both literature and history in the colony are thus forms of ideology and compliance rather than forms of free expression, and any engagement with their formal laws demands an engagement with colonial power.8 In European historiography, argues White, the emphasis on structure gradually displaced the romantic vital impulse throughout the nineteenth century. By 1867, Marx could emplot the history of capitalism as a mechanist formula with scientific laws, and by the first decades of the twentieth century most social sciences were becoming increasingly nomological and verifiable. At roughly the same time, as I will argue in the case of Romesh Chandra Dutt, the generic logic of European historiography, as form rather than as expression, was already well established. Bengali writers had learned the laws of genre, and a "battle for parity," as Guha calls it, was underway. In Guha's estimation, the Indian writing of history is revealed as an Hegelian struggle for identity and recognition between fundamentally unequal subjects: "the autonomy of Indian historiography amounted . . . to challenging . . . Britain's right to rule India."9 It was a struggle over the very definition of truth. Guha's Hegelian parable reminds us that British historiography of the colonial period, by attempting to make the history of India "an interesting portion" of the history of Britain, exemplified a political and ideological "need to get its conquest and domination recognized as a triumph of an historic will and the realization of an historic destiny" (IHI, 49). This imperial "need," besides rendering British historiography parasitically dependent on the relation of dominance, also forced Indian historiography to contest the present in a battle to "expropriate the expropriators by making the Indian people . . . the subject of their own history" (IHI, 61). This dialectical creation of a subject-position for the Indian

The Ruse of Progress

13

people involved a complex relationship to British ideology that was rarely conceived of in binary terms, or as a radical alterity positing an "us" versus a "them." True to Hegel, Guha admirably complicates the identities of both ruler and ruled.10 The first attempts at producing a native history that would reclaim the past from the expropriators and rewrite it with the Indian people as subject came, not surprisingly, from the urban middle class or bhadmlok, who had been most thoroughly saturated by the ideologies of Imperial historiography through their European education.11 Bankimchandra Chatterjee, often a vociferous critic of government policy and a leading figure of the early nationalist movement, was among the first graduates of Calcutta University, an institution established by the Company's Educational Despatch of 1854, to train willing subjects for government employ. Bankimchandra later pursued a career within the colonial administration, which necessarily forced him into close affiliation with British rule. Other eminent intellectuals of the preIndependence period rallying under the banner of liberal nationalism whom I will consider here—Romesh Chandra Dutt, Dinesh Chandra Sen, and Sushil Kumar De—all maintained cordial relations with authority throughout their careers, and indeed their historical work was directly enabled by collaboration with government agencies. Conversely, avowed radicalism also negotiated some uncomfortable contradictions. Cambridge-educated Aurobindo Ghose, for example, became disaffected from the British government only after failing the examination for appointment to the Indian Civil Service. Somewhat later, the early Marxism of Sushobhan Sarkar, not unlike the materialist "ethnography" of J. C. Ghosh, incoporated strands of bourgeois and idealist thinking into its critical historiographical practice. The ideological makeup of these historians, in short, is radically and irreducibly contradictory. Attempting, on the one hand, to correct the historical record and expropriate it from the epistemological blind spots and neurotic mechanisms of domination that colored official Imperial histories, these historians nonetheless relied heavily on imported notions of realism and empiricism to collect their facts and order them into linear narratives. This combination of culturalist aspirations with colonialist narrative forms produces a hybrid

14

Introduction

discourse of identification and disavowal that renders the writing of cultural history in colonial India a shifting, unstable site of discursive struggle. Given the heavy dose of English education bequeathed to middle-class Indians during the colonial period, what Sara Suleri describes as an "economy of complicity and guilt" 12 in colonial discourse can be seen to revolve predominantly around the themes and tropes of nineteenth-century European liberalism. Itself maintaining a dominant place within the composition of English ideology at home and abroad as both the philosophical legitimation of participatory government and the economic rationale of capitalist expansion (both of which could be violated in the colony through pseudological amendments to its basic propositions), liberalism still represents the towering epistemological formation to be rethought from the perspective of colonialism.13 Guha argues that a critical historiography of colonialism must position itself "outside" the parameters of liberal discourse. But in fact most of the writers examined here do subscribe to liberal notions of self-government and a general sense of cultural progress occurring under colonialism. Perhaps especially in the colony the outside of liberal discourse is not an easy place to find. Cultural historiography in late-nineteenth-century Bengal owed little to traditional native models if it sought to look outside the liberal paradigm. While the Sanskrit tradition possessed a notion of history or itihasa which, according to Meenakshi Mukherjee, "straddle chronicle as well as fiction,"14 the recovery of this ancient model was far removed from the explicit intention of most nineteenth- and twentieth-century middle-class cultural historians.15 In most cases, these newly Westernized intellectuals attempted to write within the dominant paradigm of historical realism inherited from European historiography of the nineteenth century. While they often achieved great triumphs in their employment of foreign narrative standards, and in some cases significantly transformed the regulative conventions of received historical method, it was only infrequently that an equally "realistic" attitude was expressed toward the totality of the Imperial project under which they wrote. Although there was

The Ruse of Progress

15

often a strong nationalist component to their writing, it still found itself largely unable to come to grips with the cultural crisis of traditional society, and was sometimes blind to the damage imperialism had done to the native cultural and economic systems. Those historians who did observe social decay and disruption during the British period, as many could not help but do, frequently tended to explain it away through ingenious narrative strategies, depicting this corruption as a phenomenon inherited from a previous historical period (the Mughal or "medieval" period), as the persistence of an essentialized attribute of native society predating and unaffected by colonialism ("tradition," "the dead weight of the past"), or as an unfortunate by-product of acculturation somehow compensated, even necessitated, by the influx of progressive European culture. It is to this conception of progressive acculturation, I would suggest, particularly the improvement of the aesthetic dimension, that we must look for an explanation of the persistence of English as a cultural standard in India. Along with the appropriation of European realism as a narrative standard for Indian historiography, the literary criticism incorporated into such histories was highly influenced by trends prevailing in Europe and England. The estimation by native historians of the complex and contradictory ways in which native artists appropriated European forms, genres, and ideologies was, on the whole, somewhat limited. Just as Indian cultural historians themselves utilized imported narrative forms and philosophical attitudes in judging and plotting the historical field, their literary criticism frequently depicted native cultural producers, such as those who used the form of the novel, as engaged in a beneficial project of Europeanizing the cultural system, and they applauded what they felt were the closest approximations to European aesthetic forms. It would be a mistake to deduce from this that Indian cultural historians merely replicated the prevailing modes of European historiographical practice. On the contrary, Indian historians frequently attempted to match the ideological description of the organic unfolding of European culture by juxtaposing to it the highlights of modern Indian cultural achievement, and they struggled to deduce examples of cultural efflores-

i6

Introduction

cence—which Western observers usually misunderstood as miniature reproductions of its own—in order to counter the dominant perception of India as merely a "small portion" of the grand British metanarrative. If Indian cultural historians could not explicitly acknowledge what Marx as early as 1853 had called the destructive mission of the British in India,16 they did perhaps attempt to express an analogous insight through various narrative mechanisms that implicitly criticized European historiographical standards as quickly as it learned from them. I would submit that Indian cultural historiography, by contesting the past, displayed an implicit resistance to English dominance in the very structure of narrative itself, determining to a great degree the various combinations of emplotment, argumentation, tropology, and ideological implications employed by cultural history writers. My purpose here is not to criticize these historians for writing, or failing to write, from a certain perspective, but rather to analyze the aims and intentions of native historiographical work by plotting its narrative mechanisms against both the immediate political struggles under which it was being undertaken and the longer temporality of European narrative conventions from which it borrowed. My overriding concern here is with narrative activity as symptomatic, even symbolic, of deeper social tensions that the narrative act attempts to resolve through projecting various images of time, space, community, identity, freedom, and so on. If we can follow with Fredric Jameson the injunction to "always historicize!" the local practice of Indian historiography takes on a much wider resonance as the site of a discursive struggle, the stakes of which are the very definition of the relationships linking India and England, past and present, "history" and "truth," that for over two hundred years significantly affected the course of world civilization.

II One of the period's most central and durable ideologies was the supposed autonomy of the aesthetic as a distinct modality of cogni-

The Ruse of Progress

17

tion. The concept of the aesthetic in modern European thought, as Michael Sprinker has recently reaffirmed, has long served a contradictory function. At once presuming to capture, in its totality, the empirical richness of social experience ("art comprehends life"), the aesthetic simultaneously escapes the mundane world of experience to open up a new cognitive realm in which contradictions are canceled and imagination is given free reign, producing "a supererogatory harmonizing of the cognitive faculties" ("art is greater than life").17 While the discursive field of Anglo-Indian colonialism swirled with concepts and idioms that often collided, overlapped, and reversed direction—the racialist idiom of European cultural superiority transforming itself into the discourse of Indian nationalism was among the most representative of these—this contradictory conceptualization of the aesthetic remained remarkably stable even as it was appropriated and mobilized by different parties for widely different ends. English ideology actively promoted a wide variety of messages designed to elicit compliance to foreign rule from among the ranks of the newly created middle class, and the mobilization of the aesthetic was among its most successful. The concept of the aesthetic, especially as embodied in the colony in its highest form as English literature, served at least a two-fold purpose. In two highly visible fields of English colonial activity—linguistic researches on the vernacular and even more prominently in the liberal definition of the aims of education—the special value of the aesthetic was invoked for its ability to maintain control over territories conquered by force. The first purpose was well expressed in an unlikely place. According to Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, an Orientalist scholar serving under Warren Hastings in the East India Company administration in the late eighteenth century, the importation of English ideology, as facilitated through the creation of a "medium of intercourse" between empire and colony, would "require that her new subjects should as well feel the benefits, as the necessity of submission."18 For Halhed, and prophetic of a policy that would be officially implemented sixty years later, English arts and sciences served as the infinitely deep repository of social control; European literature contained a sum of ideological messages sufficiently copious to guarantee submission of the

18

Introduction

Indian people to British rule without undue "effusion of blood." 19 In this formulation, art is ideology par excellence and is consonant with Louis Althusser's definition of an Ideological Apparatus (although we must note that the East India Company did not technically constitute a "state"). For Halhed, English literature could serve as a particularly eloquent and flexible form for the interpellative messages of ideology in general. In the colonial context, it would ensure the identification of subjugated peoples with their role as subjects of the grand, universalizing figure of the British Empire.20 . At the same time, a parallel conception of art and literature was circulating in the colony that stressed the timeless and transcendental properties of the aesthetic experience. It averred that great art was universal and thus above the petty disputes of power and social ideology. Thomas Babington Macaulay invoked this complex definition in his famous phrase, "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia." 21 Although Macaulay argued from a utilitarian position when he urged the exclusive adoption of English in government-funded schools in 1835, his estimation of the "worth" of European literature mobilized a durable legacy of Western aesthetic thought, descending from Kant, that is not usually identified with utilitarian social theory. In this tradition, the aesthetic judgment is viewed as a synthetic, reconciliatory mental process, "not a separate category but a principle of articulation between various known faculties, activities, and modes of cognition."22 In the synthesis of aesthetic judgment, the viewer of great art or the reader of great literature was said to be lifted to a realm of contemplation higher than those of rational thought or moral obligation. In Kant's schema, the aesthetic realm freed the subject from the imposition of concepts, whether moral or rational, and allowed his mental activity to indulge in an "entirely disinterested satisfaction."23 This mental freedom confirmed man's fundamental autonomy, as the appreciation of beauty was what separated human from animal: only mankind took such pleasure in the free play of its thought, and thus aesthetic contemplation could be said to embody the highest achievement of the human mind. This satisfaction was deemed universal by Kant in that all men

The Ruse of Progress

19

were considered capable of indulging in it, whereas intellection by concepts, such as those of morality and rationality, was restricted by region and training. Macaulay's inability to derive aesthetic satisfaction from his readings of Sanskrit and Persian literature in translation perhaps contributed to his estimation of their worth. 24 More insistent, however, was the claim to universality made by Kant: aesthetic experiences were potentially available to everyone. Kant's system is profoundly Eurocentric, even racist, in its imputing of the qualities that enable "everyone" to partake of the grandeurs of aesthetic judgment, for he makes it clear that these qualities are not shared by the Iroquois, the negro, the Chinaman, or the New Zealander (to cite his examples), although such people may possess them in potential. The brazenly egalitarian project of Macaulay and other liberal reformers who endorsed his plan would be to undertake in India the aesthetic education described by Kant's contemporary, Friedrich Schiller, that eventually led to the attainment, political as much as cognitive, of the "aesthetic State": "only the communication of the Beautiful unites society, because it relates to what is common to them all. . . . Sensuous good can make only one happy man. . . . Absolute good can bring happiness only under conditions which are not to be universally assumed.... Beauty alone makes all the world happy, and every being forgets its limitations as long as it experiences her enchantment." 25 Such conceptions entered the educational system of Young Bengal early on through the teaching of Romantic poetry and the enthusiastic modernity of the Derozians. These were not necessarily projects of domination and in most cases were seen at the time, by both English and Indians, as liberatory.26 John Stuart Mill's involvement in the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy that led to Englishlanguage education in India—a connection I cannot explore here in detail—only makes more dramatic the links between Romantic theories of the symbol and the maintenance of social control. 27 Later in the century, however, the great image of authority projected in the everyday appearance of the Eternal Raj reinforced the connection between social control and aesthetic contemplation, as it fashioned itself through countless common images as the aesthetic embodi-

20

Introduction

ment of Right and Order. This image of the Raj projected itself as seemingly removed from the petty concerns of day-to-day administration, as outside the specific reality of history itself.28 Through this mobilization of the aesthetic in the smooth appearance of power, both the colonized subject and the government functionary were offered a dimension of imaginary, subjective satisfaction that lifted him above the mundane drudgery of administration or even subordination; in the reveries of aesthetic contemplation, the solitary genius could transcend his earthly position and attain what Paul de Man has called the "self-enclosed, self-reflexive totality" of aesthetic enjoyment, even while performing activities favorable to the state.29 As subsequent discussions of Kantian aesthetics have shown, judgments of taste are never truly absolved from judgments of power.30 Even when invoking the purposelessness of aesthetic enjoyment, the policies of the India government, as expressed in its educational and cultural dispatches, usually indicated a purposive and intentional mobilization of aesthetic satisfaction for political ends. This dual and contradictory employment of aesthetic ideology was expressed in official performances of state such as the Delhi durbar, the creation of museums and public monuments, as well as through its choices of architectural styles. Necessarily, the limits of enjoyment were always dictated by and constrained within the dominancesubordination relationship. Yet the recourse to arguments about the "free play" of disinterested contemplation, accessible through great art and literature, served as both the legitimation of Imperial governance and the positive idea that India was progressing under foreign rule. To be sure, Macaulay's conception of the worth of English literature stressed practical usefulness rather than airy abstraction. But his employment of the rhetorical figure is symptomatic of the Eurocentrism of aesthetic thought in its neat ability to disavow entire civilizations and millennial histories by a swift coup of European genius. The intrinsic value of a single shelf of European literature could displace and render superfluous the history and experience of countless millions of people, its worth sanctified by its presumed higher cognitive ability, which allowed it, even righteously demanded of it, to de-

The Ruse of Progress

21

mote the lived experience of millions to secondary status beneath the play of the faculties. This is a conception of art which views itself as transcending ideology even as it raises a single object, English literature, to the status of self-contained totality, capable of synthesizing and superseding "all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations."31 When Bengali historians began to conceive of their culture as a coherent, organic entity possessing both temporal duration and spatial location, it was partially by means of these contradictory notions of the aesthetic that such definitions became possible. According to dozens of literary histories written in the hundred years between 1870 and 1970, the internal coherence of Bengali culture was recognized in contradistinction to, and in competition with, the holistic vision of English culture being promoted in the schools and through other official institutions. If it would be difficult to locate a definition of Bengali cultural identity before 1800, by 1900 "Bengaliness" had become a standard marker of the distinctiveness of Bengali as opposed to other Indian languages and literatures—and of course to English. Thus the historical construction of Bengali cultural identity in this period was dependent upon the countervailing weight of "Englishness" so central to the efficient maintenance of power in India. This made the conceptualization of "modern" or colonial Bengali culture an antagonistic formation, and charged the dialectical pull of identitarian discourses with tension. As Guha remarks on the first histories of Bengal written in the vernacular language, "for the subordinate language to emulate the dominant was not only to acknowledge the latter's superiority, but also to enter into rivalry with it in an attempt to achieve parity" (IHI, 42). One way in which parity could be achieved within the hierarchy of power was through the universalizing claims of the aesthetic. For Romesh Chandra Dutt, it was the extraordinary achievement of modern Bengali literature to emulate the best of European literature that provoked and demanded his cultural history of Bengal. As late as i960, in his Government of India sponsored History of Bengali Literature, we see Sukumar Sen continuing to subscribe to this view

22

Introduction

of parity when he writes, of Tagore's 1913 Nobel prize, "it was of tremendous significance for India, being the first recognition of contemporary India as an equal partner in the assembly of the men of letters of the free and progressive world." 32 Buddhadev Bose, guided by a similar Utopian aestheticism almost three-quarters of a century after Dutt, maintained that "Rabindranath . . . made Bengal a part of Europe, and the Bengalis citizens of the world." 33 Such claims were evidently attempts to achieve equality with European standards of taste and would lead the first cultural historians (as well as several after them) down a trail that would ultimately prove inimical to the autonomy they sought in contesting the historical field. By following the logic of the European aesthetic, as well as its standards of realism in history and the undergirding principles of historical philosophy explaining change, continuity, development, and so on, the intelligentsia appropriated certain idioms in their work which were essentially nothing more than translations of dominant European concepts. But gradually these translations acquired different values in their new semantic constellations, often leading to radically unstable, even contradictory connotative dimensions. Within any putative conception of a rhetorical totality informing English India, competition, refashioning, and counter-practice exerted an equal if not greater force than compliance to the dominant discourse. Among the most prevalent of these translated idioms was the idea of progress. Guha, in another essay, has explored "the idiom of improvement" in British administrative discourse from Cornwallis to Bentinck, a lexicon that covered a multitude of practices and ideologies and "informed all efforts made by the colonial rulers to relate non-antagonistically to the ruled."34 While early cultural historians displayed some ambivalence about the progress of social and economic reform, they were much quicker to embrace the belief that aesthetic forms had progressed under colonial rule. These historians clearly agreed that the native cultural system was improved by the absorption of European aesthetic ideas and practices, such as the novel, and that vernacular art was "getting better" under the influence of England. This concept of progress, especially as witnessed in aesthetic development, helped to inspire the notion of a "Bengal Re-

The Ruse of Progress

2.3

naissance" considered by some as the unambiguous gift of European civilization to a previously backward race. While early nationalist historians sometimes questioned this assumption, it was not until the Marxist writers and historians of the 1930s and 1940s that it would come under any serious, if not yet systematic, scrutiny. More often it was vigorously endorsed and applauded, even by such critics of British rule as Aurobindo. Early on, however, the notion of improvement or progress was invested with critical potential, and could be read teleologically to imply an attainment of equality by native culture that would eventually challenge Britain's right to rule India. The slow pace of actual material progress in the colony could also be interpreted, in some cases, as the unfortunate failure of European ideas to live up to their self-proclaimed universality. In such ways the Bengali appropriation of English ideology gradually worked to undermine the illusions of European liberalism, as colonial subjects worked ideology to the point where it began to split and fray. Along with this dominant idiom of progress followed a host of related ideologies expressed both consciously and unconsciously in historical narratives of the period. My exposition will map these narrative strategies against what Hayden White considers to be the four essential modes of historiographical storytelling in Europe. The following chapters will explore the ways in which Bengali cultural histories both assumed and rejected the narrative forms and combinations of European historiography and how native histories, while appropriating certain structures of narrative organization, also transformed and indigenized European historical methods by combining, discarding, selecting, and generally working on what White calls the "elective affinities among the various modes" that define acceptable styles of historical writing in the West.35 There is nothing to gain by an inert classification of historians into "tragic" or "comic" modes of storytelling, nor by ranging these Bengali writers into a hierarchical subset beneath the major European historians from whom they obviously learned so much. On the contrary, the point of this examination of historiographical discourse is to measure the degree of penetration of European ideology into Indian narrative systems, and to observe the various strategies by which Bengali writers embraced,

24

Introduction

subverted, and came to grips in general with a pervasive overlay of imported culture. We should expect neither uncritical compliance nor outright rejection of European culture in the colony. Part of the fascination of reading colonial historiography, apart from its own inestimable value in restoring the sense of perpetual discursive conflict to the historical record which colonialist historiography struggles to suppress, is the reciprocal perspective it provides on European historiographical practice itself. Particularly in the case of the early colonizing nations such as England and France, the view from the periphery exposes seams and gaps never articulated within metropolitan discourse, revealing vast panoramas of incomprehension and contradiction within what appear to be the homogenous logics of closure manufactured in the name of acceptable or realistic historiographical style. Indeed, were one pressed to find, with Walter Benjamin, the cutting edge for a critique of the "barbarous" tendencies of "civilized" documents, one could do worse than begin with the abuses of "civilized" culture that leap into view in the colonial setting.36 According to White, "the dialectical tension which characterizes the work of every master historian usually arises from an effort to wed a mode of emplotment with a mode of argument or of ideological implication which is inconsistent with it."37 When charted against the acceptable modes of European historiography, every colonial historian begins to look like a master. The aporias of liberal thought yawn most widely at its margins. How can cultural progress be reconciled with social decay? More pointedly, how can the ideologies of liberal thought—participatory government, universal enfranchisement, the Eights of Man—converge with practical autocracy? When the economic injustice of colonial exploitation becomes clearly visible to sight, how is the accumulation of profit in Europe harmonized with the drain of wealth in the colony? In their importation and translation into the native cultural system, the dominant modes of European narrative were digested and transformed, sometimes into shapes bearing little or no resemblance to their European identities. The frequent marriages between modes of narration that might be considered inconsistent in Europe will appear as symptoms of the

The Ruse of Progress

25

unstable alignments between aesthetic freedom and the brute fact of dominance in the colonial context.

Ill Partha Chatterjee has recently called on critics "to trace . . . the numerous, fragmented resistances" to the "normalizing project" of an Indian nationalist modernity constructed on the European model.38 Chatterjee's powerful insights into the nature of Indian nationalism and the many variegated forces that resisted the reproduction of European-style modernity are pertinent here. In an earlier work, Chatterjee examined the embrace of European nationalist thought by three major thinkers in the history of Indian anticolonialism, finding in each of them something of a dead end. He pronounced nationalism "a derivative discourse" in the colonial world, one that could only lead to a repetition of the "thematic" of colonial exploitation for the postcolonial state.39 This grim view of a dependent Independence accorded with Hegel's ironic vision of the "cunning of reason," in which rational forms of organization turned out to serve irrational purposes, such as the continued impoverishment of vast parts of the globe in the name of European progress, or the equally baleful prospect of national autonomy eventually contributing to a fundamentally unequal international order. In his more recent work, Chatterjee, as well as other historians influenced by the Subaltern Studies project, has reexamined the marginal fragments of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century vernacular culture that earlier studies left unturned, finding in them voices of a "subaltern" consciousness that has always conditioned the expression of elite discourses, such as those of the nation, by forcing them to negotiate with alternate visions of an anticolonial modernity.40 In both the mainstream and marginal text I examine here, I find a similar oppositional consciousness, confusedly engaged with the totalizing narratives of aesthetic universality unleashed by English colonialism. One could argue that nationalism as a concept operated in a similarly

26

Introduction

totalizing, universalistic way for social thinkers, posing an abstract embodiment, the nation, as the immediate, specific demand to which all civilized people are entitled. But literature, or the aesthetic, offers an even higher realm of inclusion within the civilizational claims of the West. By engaging in literature one can bypass the particularist limits of the nation to lay claim to what is timeless and transcendent, thereby attaining equality not merely on earth but in the heaven of universal judgment. The more developed stream of cultural historiography in Bengal does seemingly embrace the cunning of reason by attempting to duplicate the standards and modes of European history writing. Whereas Guha could describe this emulation of European standards as a battle for parity, designed to prove the civilizational equality of the Indian subject, the danger of winning that battle lies precisely in accepting the terms of struggle. To embrace universality, one must embrace Europe. This could never be a complete acceptance, however, since the game was rigged from the start; any pretensions to universality made by European art, philosophy, or social thought must be seen, as Enrique Dussel phrases it, as "the theoretical consumation of the practical oppression of peripheries."41 Furthermore, English claims to be educating Indians for their eventual independence posited a spurious notion of equality, since the Indian was educated, as Macaulay famously put it, to be "Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."42 Of course this was far from the whole story on Indian education, but the imperative was clear: the creation of a dual subject, resembling the Englishman but denied his rights to citizenship, long formed a desired object for government. "Parity" could only ever result in mimicry, the approximation of a European ideal without actually attaining it. For Bengal truly to become "a part of the world" it would have to become sovereign in earthly time. Meanwhile, the attainment of literature confirmed Bengal's worthiness of inclusion in "the great family of man." In tracing the resistant practices of a subaltern modernity, the real question becomes one of measurement. When does an utterance fall prey to the normalizing project of reason's cunning, and when

The Ruse of Progress

27

does it resist the colonizing of the mind to display counter-projects, however fragmented, to a hegemonic modernity? We should beware of any simple determinations in judging this distinction. As in the contradictory constitution of the colonial subject, it is quite possible to do both at once. This is why context is so important to the operations of colonial mimicry. What in one situation can be read as compliance in another can be read as resistance. This is not a facile ambivalence based on relativism, but a constitutive ambivalence based on the fundamental tensions built into the colonizing project, tensions that are illuminated most subtfy in the playing out of form. This dialectical tension between compliance and resistance leads Chatterjee to conclude that Indian nationalism possessed a split personality. In its official or public form, it embraced the superior materialism of European culture—its science, economy, government, institutions—while in its domestic or private form it rejected Europe's spiritual impoverishment relative to Indian culture. What Indian culture considered its true essence, its spiritual cultivation and moral refinement, it confined to the home. This "home" was of course not sealed off entirely from Western influence, but in Chatterjee's words, "here [in the 'home'] nationalism launches its most powerful, creative, and historically significant project: to fashion a 'modern' national culture that is nevertheless not Western. If the nation is an imagined community, then this is where it is brought into being."43 Chatterjee now calls for a project of ramagining that would conjure up the various alternatives that circulated through, negotiated with, and themselves transformed the discourse of Indian nationalism. Whether one can call this a specifically "subaltern" imaginary is a subject I will consider in Chapter 5. My hesitation in embracing Chatterjee's demarcation of the national public sphere into home and world stems from my readings in the literary historiographical tradition of Bengal. While I find a substantial amount of resistance to colonial rule, both overt and subtle, built into these texts, I also detect a remarkable amount of compliance with the rules of writing history according to European standards. It is in this simultaneous acceptance and rejection of European ideology that the aesthetic dimension constitutes the discursive

Introduction

28

location in which home and world come together—not comfortably, but in what Fanon calls a "zone of occult instability." To say that culture becomes confined to the home in the Indian nineteenth century risks understating its public, political significance. The discourses of art and culture are forced to be political, as resolutely as they state their separation from the world, and in the very act of enunciation attempt to clear a space that might be free of outside influence. The first indication of this appears in the appropriation of the foreign forms of expression imposed by colonial rule. *

*

*

In tracing the dialectic between compliance and resistance I have occasionally referred to the monumental typology of European historiographie form given in Hayden White's Metahistory. I use this model heuristically, not as a standard to be emulated but as a convenient catalogue against which alternatives can be measured. This will become clearer as the chapters progress. For the reader's convenience I have reproduced White's basic model of combination below.

Mode of Emplotment

Mode of Argument

Mode of Ideological Implication

Trope

Romantic Tragic Comic Satirical

Formist Mechanistic Organicist Contextualist

Anarchist Radical Conservative Liberal

Metaphor Metonymy Synecdoche Irony

I

Liberal Nationalist Histories

i I START WITH A B O O K THAT is almost unknown within the field of Indian literary history. Despite its obscurity it may well exemplify the difficulties inherent in writing cultural history anywhere. Although Bengali literary history is already at least fifty years old by the time of its writing, I begin with Kumudnath Das's A History of Bengali Literature, published in 1926, in order to illustrate schematically the complexity of the field. I will return to the historical origins of the genre in the next section. For now, I risk overreading the first pages of this book to explicate the structural relation of history and literature in a text that, while marginal, may be the most representative work in the canon. A History of Bengali Literature opens with an epigraph from Carlyle: "Literature is fast becoming all in all to us—our church, our senate, our whole social contitution [sic]." More exemplary even than the misspelling, the appearance of such a statement in a book intending to outiine the development of Bengali literary history "from the earliest upto [sic] modern times" summarizes a contradiction lying deep at the heart of colonial Indian modernity. This contradiction is worth examining here, in this first chapter of a history of Indian literary history, because it announces a problem that haunts any attempt to write history or to consider the question of literature. The difficult interrelationship between "history" and "literature" stems not so much from the specifics of the Indian situation as from England's attempt to theorize and export a globally

30

Chapter i

dominant culture in the early nineteenth century. That the contradiction between history and literature in English thought should find its way into Bengali literary historiography is not at all surprising. What is stunning is that the contradiction is played out more explicitly in Bengal than in any contemporary English text I can name. As we have come to accept that the creation of the English literary canon and the notion of an English department were intimately connected with the rise of the British Empire, and thus the cultural domination of Britain's colonies, we may begin to learn to look to the peripheries for more adequate descriptions of what seem to be the informing tensions of European thought. Bengali literary history is among the privileged vantage points from which to interrogate the cultural logic of European modernity. I found Das's A History of Bengali Literature practically at the end of my research. Over six years and three continents, I had found no mention of Das's book in the dozens of other literary and cultural histories I consulted, nor any reference to it in the card catalogues of the Duke University Library, the Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester, the National Library, Calcutta (where I carried out the bulk of my research), the India Office Library of the British Museum, or the Library of Congress. It finally caught my eye in the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania, where I came upon it entirely by accident. Undistinguished looking, with a jet black binding bearing no title, it would have been easy to miss—cited nowhere, missing from the best collections, unread, unloved. One would be tempted to call it unimportant. But in discourse analysis of the kind practiced here, the principles of selection are limited by a multitude of factors, not least among them the availability of texts. Roland Barthes remarks in Elements of Semiology on the importance of the principle of saturation in conducting structuralist readings: a comprehensive analysis can only be completed when the actual field to be considered is strictly limited, and so can be thoroughly covered.1 Mine is a/xwfstructuralist reading in that my field is not strictly limited, nor can my analysis ever be exhaustive. What has passed under the heading of literary history in Bengal since 1870 has assumed a multitude of forms inhabiting various registers, from authoritative

Liberal Nationalist Histories

31

scholarly tracts to political propaganda, from well-mannered politics in the form of objective research to the most blatant of partisan arguments, from densely argued theoretical tomes to blithe, popular résumés. I have tried to account for several of these genres, keeping in mind that literary history is as subjective and ideological as any other human science, and so my methods must shift to account for data that seems incongruous. I keep finding literary histories that no one else has mentioned. So much for comprehensiveness, closure, and conclusions. The green paper cover lists the tide, A History of Bengali Literature, and the author, Kumud Nath Das, who we are told is the author of a book called Rabindranath: His Mind and Art. The book is published by "Das Brothers, Naogaon, Rajshahi, Bengal," and the price is listed in the lower right-hand corner as "Rs. 2/-." All of this information is reproduced on the first page inside the cover, although now, strangely, the author is given as "K. N. Das," who, reassuringly, is still the author of Rabindranatb: His Mind and Art, the tide of which is repeated. The tide of this previous work is criss-crossed by the pretzel-shaped burrowing of a worm, an unsurprising find in an old Indian book. The worm has managed to leave its mark on the first five pages. Included on the first page are the year, 1926, and the epigraph from Carlyle cited above. The price has been erased from the tide page in my copy, although it is still faindy legible beneath the lighdy abraded paper. On the verso of the tide page, two books are listed "By the Same Author." One is "Rabindranath: His Mind and Art. Re. (1-8)," which is followed by four endorsements from various sources including an "Ex. [Executive? former?] Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University" and three newspapers. One of them, from the newspaper The Forward, states "the author . . . has . . . given lucid meanings of his [Rabindranath's] masterpieces many of which are unintelligible to ordinary readers." The thrice-repeated mention of Tagore has by now become almost incantatory, and it will authorize a wide range of claims. The second tide by the same author is "Matriculation Essays (10 Annas)," which an A. B. [Ananda Bazaar? Amrita Bazaar?] Patrika claims "will prove of great use to the Matriculation candidates." Both are published by Das Brothers; no re-

32

Chapter i

lation to the author is stated. One can deduce that Kumudnath Das was both a commentator on the work of the best-known Bengali writer of his time, the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, and a tutor in the business of helping students pass their matriculation exams. These were not entirely unrelated pursuits in Bengal in the 1920s. As the endorsements to his two books testify, Das stands in an interesting position at once highly practical and highly abstruse: providing students with standard essays to reproduce on their English language exams and simultaneously explicating the deeper "meanings" of vernacular literary masterpieces "unintelligible to ordinary readers." This combination of the sacred and the profane is repeated on the next page, where we find a dedication "In Memory of My Revered Parents Tarak Nath Das and Giribala Devi." At both the top and bottom of the page are Bengali inscriptions in quotations. The inscription at the top, "pita svargah pita dharmah pita hi poromostuph," can be translated as "father heaven, father law, father of the highest learning." But A History is clearly not a religious text. Its very tide announces its entry into secular time, and the fact of its publication in English marks it as a product of European modernity. At the bottom, the inscription "janani janmobhumisch svargadopi goriyashi" can be rendered as "mother, the land of birth, is better even than heaven." Such phrases, especially in Bengal, stir memories of the popular reaction against the English government's partition of the province in 1905 and the agitation for its repeal, which eventually blossomed into a proto-independence (Swadeshi) movement. Situated between these two inscriptions, the memory of Das's parents bridges heaven and earth. Resembling Das's ability both to make intelligible the hidden meanings of Tagore's masterpieces as well as to pass students through their boring exams, the memory of Das's parents links the worldly motherland to the spiritual home of the gods. Is it symbolic that the heavenly inscription is at the top of the page, while that of the motherland is placed nearer the "ground"? But this is misleading; the spatial analogy is reversed when we read that the motherland is better "even than heaven," that the world of the nation can be "better" than the world of the ancestors. The better world is in fact on the ground.

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Perhaps the position of the two inscriptions on the page is meant to upset our expectations of the locations of heaven and earth. If we were to continue to read the oppositions on this page homologically with those of the previous page, we would also be forced to question the distance in our first opposition between deep meanings and matriculation. Could matriculation within the context of the educational system then in place, at a time of strenuous anticolonial resistance, be seen as part of the national cause? To jump ahead for a moment, the closing lines of Das's History end jarringly on a note of linguistic patriotism: "Look at the curricula of the Calcutta and Dacca University. Far from being the medium of instruction in our schools and colleges, it [Bengali] is the only branch of study which is thoroughly neglected in all educational institutions" (226). Must one make a living from selling Matriculation Essays in English even if one opposes the government's educational policy? What does this have to do with deep meanings, or literature as "all in all"? Why write a history of Bengali literature in English? It is significant that "memory" here links heaven and the motherland. Memory implies the recovery of human history as opposed to divine law. In this case the memory of the parents forges a symbolic link between the spiritual and the earthly, the religious and the national, the timeless and the temporal. When we find that the motherland is better than heaven, however, we begin to realize that within the history of the nation the eternal souls of the departed can continue to inhabit the earthly realm, for the nation as such is never geographic as much as it is psychic, imaginary, invented. In the "imagined community" of the nation, according to Benedict Anderson, the dead never really depart; they inhabit the "empty, homogenous time" of infinite becoming that characterizes national history, which is the continuous, ever-present synchronicity of all the accumulated possibilities of a people. In national time, the dead are never really dead; they are magically transformed into precursors, monuments, or heroes.2 On the other hand, one must matriculate in linear, chronological time; graduation from school implies duration and development, the completion of certain requirements, a rite of passage from one state to the next. The deeper "meanings" of Tagore's

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"unintelligible" verse seem to imply the opposite: a reckoning with transcendental mystery, the eternal as Truth, being rather than becoming. Rabindranath: His Mind and Art comments on the stillness of heaven, Matriculation Essays on the linear temporality of earth. The verso of the dedication page is blank. After it follows a note, a table of contents, and fifteen numbered quotations on literature and art from American and European writers such as Longfellow, Goethe, Matthew Arnold, and Ruskin. The note again invokes Tagore, this time decisively linking him both to the world and to Bengal. "The meteoric triumphs of Tagore's poetry must have awakened in all parts of the civilized world a real desire to know the up-to-date history of Bengali Literature." To this point the text has generated a series of linked binary oppositions, each bearing a homologous relationship to the others. The first opposition, deep meaning // school matriculation, is controlled by Das himself, an author who can imaginatively reconcile these seemingly antithetical pursuits, or at least undertake both. The second, heaven // motherland, is mediated through the memory of his deceased parents, whose history links the traditional practices of Hindu theology and the modern religion of nationalism. The third opposition emerges through the figure of the Poet himself, Rabindranath Tagore, who forms an imaginary locus for the relationship of colonized Bengal to "the civilized world." Each of these oppositions poses not unbridgeable differences but a series of relations, by which the drudgery of schoolwork and the deep mystery of revealed meanings, religion and nationalism, colony and metropolis are interlaced into a symbiotic network of mutually reinforcing identities. Again, Das is the man of his age, combining and synthesizing rather than opposing some putative "traditional" Indian identity to an antipathetic European Reason. Each opposition can be usefully streamlined and clarified by reducing it to its controlling figure. In the first, it is the Author who mediates meaning // matriculation. Imagination, creativity, revelation, and production form a constellation of attributes around this locus. In the second opposition, History enacts the link between heaven and motherland. The entry of history onto the colonial stage,

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figured as an absence now transformed into a necessity ("so far as the present writer is aware, there is no work of this kind in the English or Bengali language to serve this purpose") marks the integration or "synthesis" (a much used word at the time) of tradition and modernity, religion and politics that supposedly characterizes the colonial encounter in its ideological self-representation. In the third opposition it is Tagore—also an Author and (by 1926) a History, but significantly more than that—who symbolically presents the integration of Bengal into all parts of the civilized world and who has awakened the imperative to know, curiously phrased as an imperative that demands the telling of Das's A History of Bengali Literature. The figure of Tagore as cultural icon is much too complex to be adequately treated here, and it will reappear throughout this study. For Das, as we have seen, Tagore represents a kind of precondition for the writing of Bengali literary history, as well as for the emergence of Das himself as an Author, and functions as the engine that generates history out of timeless religion and temporal existence. As we will see later, in certain situations he becomes god, man, and everything in between. Considered as a baseline, the figure of Tagore here provokes the desire of the world to know the up-to-date history of the tradition in which he wrote. Bracketing this complex figure, we have an Author and a History functioning as conduits through which schoolwork and deep meaning, heaven and earth, Bengal and the civilized world are conjoined. A fourth opposition is presented by Das's text before he launches into his subject matter proper. He has already mentioned the lack of literary histories that could provide the proper context for an understanding of Tagore. This is a bewildering statement. As the following chapters will point out, several excellent treatments of the subject, written in both English and Bengali, had been available since the early 1870s, and in the fifteen years before Das's book—that is to say within very recent memory—two monumental, highly influential volumes provided exactly what Das claims in his note does not exist: "a fair idea of the leading traits and tendencies of Bengali Literature from the earliest upto [sic] modern times." To make matters more confusing, Das mentions in the very next sentence that he has

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"derived help from some writers" who have come before him, and he specifically cites one of these monumental histories, D. C. Sen's 1911 Banga Bhasa 0 Sahitya, for assisting him "especially in the preparation of the History of Old Bengali Literature." So what is missing? On the one hand, plenty of literary history has already been written, and Das knows it and uses it. On the other hand, Das claims that his own text is "thoroughly independent" of this influence: "The History of Modern Bengali Literature is a new thing and will, it is hoped, evoke some new interest in literary circles." Presumably then, Das is drawing a distinction between old and new, between an Old Bengali Literature and a Modern Bengali Literature that is "a new thing" and will evoke "new interest." A break within the history of old and new Bengali literatures, however, is already well established by the time he writes; almost all literary historians date what S. K. De in 1918 called "the great flood tide of literary Young Bengal" to the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet Das is proposing something different here, I think, a difference that renders the entire project extremely problematic and which throws its basic definitions into confusion. Rather than a sense of history, which Bengali literature already possesses in abundance, Das wants to invent something that has never been tried before. He wants to create a sense not of history, which is old, but of newness; not the direct antithesis of time past, but the sense of having arrived, of having ridden the long course of development that has brought Bengal to this point. To what point? To Tagore's Nobel prize, obviously, with which, Das claims, "He has secured a place for his mother tongue in the world's republic of letters" (86). But even more assuredly than this symbolic victory, Das's epigraph from Carlyle defines the state of arrival as the totality described by literature-, "all in all to us—our church, our senate, our whole social constitution." This fourth opposition between old and new we can term presentness, the belief that something important is imminent. Das seems to want to invoke something that could be called "literature," as opposed to history. After the page of contents, which lists what are by now conventional arrangements of period, genre, and school, Das's quotations begin to define this entity as a fifth opposition. The first quotation comes from Longfellow: "All that is best

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in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them but what is universal." Das had earlier quoted the line "Mother, the land of birth, is better even than heaven." The nation outweighed even heaven as a good. But Longfellow's quotation reverses this assumption. If the motherland can be elevated to the status of heaven, does that not make the national into a universal? If Tagore makes Bengal "a part of the civilized world," does that make Bengali literature universal? Apparendy not. The great poet, according to Longfellow, must transcend the national to reach the universal; what is national in his art must be superceded by its universality. The second quotation is from Lessing: "A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth." The image of life is eternal, not local. The particular forms of life are thus inferior to the universality of Life itself. The third quotation, from Lowell, states, "A poet must be before his age to be even with posterity." To attain fame the poet must be before his time, that is to say outside the details of his specific history, to be included in the universal category of great poets. The fourth quotation is from someone named Borne: "Ancient art corporealises the spiritual; modern spiritualises the corporeal." Spiritualizes the particular into a universal homogeneity? Quotation five reads, "Beauty is the highest principle and the highest aim of art" and is attributed to Goethe. The beauty that is outside time overrides and exceeds the art of historical or political engagement; art approaches the universal when it aims for heaven and escapes earth. Das's fifth opposition, that of literary universality to concrete particularity, concerns the relationship of the local to the global, and most crucially the interrelation of qualities that define universality as opposed to locality, in this case expressed as national origin. What do universals have in common, especially as they are realized in diverse places? The next seven quotations complicate this question. I will not quote them in their entirety but will summarize for the sake of argument. The sixth quotation contains the famous phrase from Matthew Arnold that "criticism is an [sic] disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world." Numbers seven through twelve, however, propose that individual genius is the surest guide to universality. Number seven, for example, from

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Goethe, argues that artists cannot help but portray themselves in their works. Number eight cites Wordsworth to the effect that every great writer "must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished." Number nine states, "Personality is everything in art and poetry," again attributed to Goethe. Ten is incomprehensible to me, an ungrammatical selection from Carlyle that reads in part, "nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it." Number eleven incorrectly attributes the phrase "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" to Disraeli, although later in Das's text it is correctly attributed to Shelley. Number twelve equates grand style with grand character, again via Goethe, and number thirteen once again explains Goethe's view of literature as "the humanization of the world." So far so good for the author of Kahindmnath: His Mind and Art. Tagore's grand personality as the preeminent Indian writer of his day seems appropriate to his international reception. But on the other hand, the genius of this one charismatic individual will by no means be guaranteed to his countrymen, whose very locality would seem to preclude their participation in the universal genius of sensitive souls. The final two quotations further complicate the contradictory image of universality that the text has so far presented. In number fourteen, Carlyle is again quoted: "Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of life, which they are thenceforth to rule." In quotation fifteen, Ruskin is mobilized favorably as a defender of the rights of art for art's sake: "Whatever in literature, art or religion is done for money is poisonous itself, and doubly deadly in preventing the hearing or seeing of the noble literature and art which have been done for love and truth." The statement in fact criticizes Kumudnath Das's profession as an author of matriculation essays. As in the previous four binaries, a timeless, unchanging entity is presented in opposition to a transitory, particular, chaotic one. The first entity is explicitly named as meaning, heaven, civilization, literature; the second as matriculation, nation, Bengal, history. Thus the universality referred to by literature, or great art, is, finally, an abstract principle that cannot yet comprehend the specificity of Indian life: matriculation, the nation, Bengal, money.

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When we return to the epigraph, Carlyle's placement at the entrance to this text now makes more sense. Literature is equated to the power of the state—"church, senate, constitution"—by way of its difference from the actual forms in which the English colonial state historically asserted its authority. But this ambition has not yet been realized; Das seems confident that it will be realized when a new modern Bengali literature comes more fully into being. Literature will become an alternate state that effectively replaces the functions of existing state institutions with something higher, what I have teased out here as the elevated terms in the series of binary oppositions: deep meaning, heaven, civilization, universality, and so on. The concept of literature proposes an alternate arrangement based on its difference from the actual forms of social organization erected by the ruling power. The universal becomes concrete in its specific realization; literature will be a form of social organization, decidedly expressed as an alternate type of government than the one pertaining now. "Literature is becoming...." This is why writing cultural history is so crucial; if it can be shown that Bengali literature has finally arrived at the civilizational equality attained by all great literature, then Bengal as a whole will have attained the right to freedom long promised by her liberal rulers. Writing Bengali cultural history in English is at least partially an attempt to educate the educators that that moment has arrived.

II The first comprehensive history of Bengali literature written in English was Romesh Chandra Dutt's Literature of Bengal (1873-77), "entirely revised" and reprinted as The Cultural Heritage of Bengal (1896).3 Dutt himself was among the first Indian members of the Indian Civil Service and thus held the highest post attainable by an Indian under the colonial administration. In 1899 he was invited to serve as president of the Indian National Congress and returned from England, to which he had retired, to assume that position.4 He is most widely known today as India's first "bourgeois economist," and is credited with coauthoring the "biggest single contribution made

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to nationalism in the pre-1905 period—the formulation of a systematic critique of the economic aspects of British rule through the drain of wealth theory."5 Dutt's belief in the battle for parity is evident in every phrase of his history. Himself a product of the British educational system, and deeply imbued with its ideologies of progress and advancement, he saw British influence as having an almost entirely beneficial effect upon Bengal's cultural life, calling the years since 1800 "the brightest period in the annals of Bengali literature." The twenty years between the praise of British influence in The Literature of Bengal and his election as leader of the organized anticolonial agitation did little to temper Dutt's enthusiasm, as is evident in the 1896 edition of The Cultural Heritage and his 1897 work, England and India: A Record of Progress During One Hundred Tears, 1785-1885. But despite its high praise for English influence, The Literature of Bengal makes some significant gestures toward developing a more balanced and politically enabling strategy for cultural nationalism. We can trace here the modest beginnings of a dialectic of resistance. Dutt asserts that it was not strictly due to foreign influence that his country now prospered: during the "Century of Progress," "the Hindu intellect came in contact with all that is noblest and most healthy in European history and literature, and profited by it" (CH, 90, my emphasis). The language of accounting, so characteristic of the utilitarian discourse of culture, contains a certain evaluative tone that might be termed proto-critical. Although English influence is applauded, it is applauded with qualification, implying that there were perhaps less noble and less healthy sides to this contact. It is within the unique capacity of the Hindu intellect, a notion that we will meet again in Bankimchandra, to selectively absorb and synthesize this influence and to create from it something not only equal but superior to English culture. "The Hindu mind was to some extent trained under the influence of European thoughts and ideas and benefitted from it" (CH, 90, my emphasis). Within the prevailing notion of "progress," we find the Bengali response meeting the British challenge on its own terms and selecting what it most desires from the culture of the colonizers, transporting the battle for intellectual and moral superiority onto the fields of Bengal.

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Yet this is by no means a displacement of the terms of contest. Dutt still feels it imperative to operate within the parameters of the dominant discourse, the confines of which, in historiography, are still determined by great men and great deeds "progressing" through a history thought to possess a logical developing principle. Thus Dutt's history of the modern period proceeds through the sixty years from Rammohun Roy's early career to the establishment of Bankimchandra as a major writer, mentioning barely a dozen authors and concentrating for the bulk of his narrative on the four towering figures of nineteenth-century literature: Roy, Michael Madhusudan Datta, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, and Bankim. Each of these figures somehow completes and improves upon his predecessors in an uninterrupted burgeoning toward aesthetic climax, culminating in the "universal genius" of Bankim. The earlier section of Dutt's history operates in much the same way, pitting Bengali writers of the classical period against their English counterparts in a battle for both duration and location. Of the ancientness of Bengali literature we are offered the example of Jayadeva, the composer of the twelfth-century Sanskrit lyric Gitagovinda. Although the poem is written in Sanskrit, and Jayadeva is usually considered to have been from Orissa (though associated with the Bengal court of Laksmanasena),6 Dutt appropriates him as a "Bengali" writer. By beginning with Jayadeva, Dutt pushes back the limits of Bengali literature before any corresponding English tradition had been formed. (One could counter here with Beowulf, but resituating the battle on these terms gives the Bengali a distinct advantage in the game of cultural parity: who would argue the sophistication of Anglo-Saxon over that of Sanskrit as a poetic language?) The "fact" of the derivation of the Bengali vernacular from the Magadhi Prakrit and back to Sanskrit, provided in a table of comparative terms, conclusively demonstrates the links of the modern to the older language. Dutt also makes an interesting case for the contemporary (1870s) practice of coining neologisms from Sanskrit—as opposed to borrowing from English or creating from Bengali—a practice that would be much debated in the following decades and most usually frowned upon as giving the language a forbidding, aristocratic air. Dutt's in-

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sistence on the Sanskritic lineage of modern Bengali as a living blood that flows through its veins allows him to extend the still-living origins of his cultural heritage to an ancientness and epic grandeur that English would find impossible to match. In this sense, Dutt is very much the nationalist historian, evoking in his readers a sense of surviving Hindu glory. Rather like Mill's strategy to write up Indian history as "an interesting portion of the British history," Dutt's description of the temporal duration of Bengali makes it incomparable, possessing a historical breadth that English simply cannot match. The English influence on the modern period of Bengali literary history is thus but an interesting portion of the entirety of Indian culture, and though it has been beneficial, its brief duration seems but a moment in the vast sweep of Indian history. This tactic of periodizing the English influence as a bright but brief moment of Indian history will return as a conservative strategy in the Hindu revivalist movements of the following decades in the radical nationalist historiography of Aurobindo. Dutt, however, is clearly liberal in his political affiliations. After extending Bengali both temporally (back to the twelfth century), and spatially (by including within the scope of Bengali the entire geography of Sanskrit literature), Dutt then specifically switches to a comparison with the European model of modern literary history, equating Chandidas (fourteenth century), "the earliest vernacular poet of Bengal," to Chaucer (CH, 20). At this point a peculiar emphasis begins to assert itself. Popular history records that Chandidas directly influenced Chaitanya, the great Vaishnava saint and religious reformer, sparking a religious and cultural "enlightenment" and "renaissance" in the sixteenth century similar to the Protestant Reformation. Chaitanya implicitly becomes the Bengali Luther. But the main inspiration for Chandidas was the Maithili poet Vidyapati who, Dutt stresses, came from Bihar, not Bengal, and whose language was indigenized to create "the stream of Bengali literature [that] began to flow as early as the fourteenth century" (CH, 20). The crucial factor here is not so much language as geography: Vidyapati, in Dutt's words, came "from the West," but his influence fully culminated only in the linguistic and social movements of the Chaitanya period, when presumably it came in con-

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tact with the unique sensibility of the "Bengali mind" and ushered in an era of rationalism and reform. The emphasis is curious, but it becomes stranger still when, according to Dutt, this precise geographical dynamic had operated before in the Buddhist period (sixth century B.C.), when another "Western" (Bihari) influence came in contact with the unique genius of Bengal and gave rise to a religious reformation that was essentially popular and progressive. History repeats itself in this infusion of ideas from the West, which are then assimilated into a distinctive Bengali synthesis. "Since the 16th century, however, Bengal has taken the lead" ( C H , 62). This historical assertion allows Dutt to predict another historic repetition that will witness the triumph, or at least the absorption by Bengal, of the cultural influence now flowing in from another Western source, namely Europe. Like the porous soil of the Ganges delta, Bengali culture swallows and digests the foreign monuments built upon it. Dutt's conceptions of temporal continuity and the assimilative quality of Bengali culture bear a distinct resemblance to what Hayden White characterizes as the strategy of explanation or formal argument known as Organicism, common to "most of the 'nationalistic' historians of the middle decades of the nineteenth century" in Europe. The Organicist attempts to depict the particulars discerned in the historical field as components of synthetic processes. . . . And the Organicist historian will tend to be governed by the desire to see individual entities as components of processes which aggregate into wholes that are greater than, or qualitatively different from, the sum of their parts. . . . For the Organicist, such principles and ideas function not as restrictions on the human capacity to realize a distinctively human goal in history, as the "laws" of history can be supposed to do . . . but as guarantors of an essential human freedom. Thus although the Organicist makes sense out of the historical process by displaying the integrative nature of the historical process taken as a whole, he does not draw the kinds of pessimistic conclusions that the strict Mechanist is inclined to draw from his reflections on the nomological nature of historical being. 7

There is an instructive comparison with Marx to be drawn here. As an economist, Dutt must have been acutely aware of the ruin of the Bengal countryside and the great profits being made in England

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by the India trade. Yet his cultural history is essentially "integrative" and regenerative, emphasizing the synthetic capacity of the "Hindu intellect" to "aggregate" the impact of English influence on Bengal into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. As opposed to the Mechanist argument of Marx's historical system, with its view of the essentially tragic consequences capitalism would have on Indian culture and society before it realized any regeneration, Dutt employs what White would describe as a Comic mode of emplotment for his story: the depredations of colonial imperialism (or "drain of wealth" as he called it) will be overcome by the healthy integrity of Indian society, and Bengal finally will have "progressed" into a more advanced state as a result of this interaction. Writing in 1853, Marx was horrified by the plunder of a formerly wealthy land, however barbaric he found some of its practices. England's unwitting participation in the dialectical laws of history will be to materially transform, through destruction, the culture that had long slept in the night of idealism, and thereby to unleash productive powers that will eventually drive the English out. Marx's tragic vision thus proves comic in the long run; dialectics is ultimately a narrative of redemption. The mechanist argument implies such contradiction, while the organicist one is inimical to conflict. Writing twenty years later, Dutt is unwilling or unable to describe the negative effects of English imperialism as he plots Bengali redemption. His Organicism is wholly integrative in the sense that it can only describe a unilinear path through development as opposed to the contradictory course charted by the dialectic. This path must be comic if India is to progress. Oddly, however, this combination in White's scheme, to properly fit an "acceptable style" of history writing in the West, should result in a conservative ideology, for the same principles that dictate the course of development (colonial rule) should determine their fulfillment: "Conservatives are inclined to imagine historical evolution as a progressive elaboration of the institutional structure that currently prevails, which structure they regard as a 'utopia'" (Metahistory, 25). By this reckoning Dutt's combination of elements surely is perverse, as his later economism and political leadership will compel him to agitate for independence. He is undoubtedly liberal in his calls for improvement and gradual

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change, fully in the contradictory spirit of the colonial liberal who feels that things are so good that they must be changed. The liberal component of Dutt's history reveals itself in the emphasis that Bengali culture has begun to flourish anew within the apparatus of colonial imperialism, a process which, after a "Century of Progress," is only just beginning. Even by 1896 he could still state that British rule has been basically beneficial; as president of the Congress, Dutt would preserve the basic structure of colonial administration intact, with certain adjustments that would eventually grant India, as Britain's cultural equal, greater political status. The degree of Dutt's liberalism is somewhat tempered by this seemingly conservative view toward institutions; however, its liberal component is expressed firmly and finally in the ultimate aims of the Congress to attain self-government in the remote future and its pledge to eschew political radicalism. It will be interesting to see how the next generation of liberal nationalist historians, writing in the first decades of the twentieth century, attempted to maintain this vision of political equanimity under pressure of growing discontent with British rule and widespread extremism. The British influence on Bengali culture is felt by Dutt as a revolution, but one that does not fracture the present from the past; the present revolution (much like the previous cultural influences from the West) somehow improves the past by making everything great and noble in Bengali culture more fully able to express itself. Thus Rammohun Roy, caught up in the spirit of modernizing, was able to free Vedic doctrine from the shackles of Brahminic orthodoxy to forge a modern yet traditional religion based on reason and "social comfort." In a similar synthesis, he manipulated the new English influence on prose writing to create a Bengali idiom attuned to the speech of the common man. Roy's appeal to the English to encourage the teaching of Western science and morals in his famous letter to Lord Amherst in 1823 is not seen as betraying the native beliefs of his countrymen but rather as opening the door to a selective appropriation of all that is good and "progressive": "Never has one man attempted and achieved more for his country than Rammohun Roy" ('CH, 98). Dutt is also much impressed by Vidyasagar's pro-widow remarriage and antipolygamy campaigns, seeing this reformism in a

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direct line that runs from Rammohun through the subsequent establishment of the English educational system and thence to government service for Indians. Dutt claims Vidyasagar's resignation from government in 1858 was over a "dispute with superiors" rather than any more radical understanding of the inequalities built into the colonial system.8 Vidyasagar's life-work is then vindicated, according to Dutt, by his appointment as Companion of the Indian Empire in 1877. Thus what has been interpreted by more radical historians as Vidyasagar's antigovernment protest is recouped as a critique of faulty implementation within a legal structure that is essentially just and fair. Dutt's overriding presupposition is that English rule, despite minor shortcomings in practical administration, is that of a beneficent master over a mass of willing subjects who retain the capacity to select and improve upon the conditions imposed from above. Dutt's profound faith in liberal reformism becomes most evident in his enthusiasm for the new literature. So proud is he of the achievements of Bengal's cultural heritage under the pressure of colonialism that the battle for parity occasionally turns heretical. "Madhu Sudan Datta is the greatest literary spirit of this century" ('CH, 127). We are not told if the comparison is relative or universal. On the next page: "The present century has produced nothing in verse comparable to that of Madhu Sudan Datta and nothing in prose comparable to Bankim Chandra" (CH, 128). The repeated mentions of the great epic poet's debts to Milton, Scott, and Byron make his inspirations clear, yet to the historian steeped in liberal romanticism, Madhusudan Datta is a solitary genius recreating the world in a spirit of divine distraction. Where some might take a formal obedience to the imported standards of English literature as evidence of cultural compromise, Dutt finds the vital, subjective impulse distinctive. Similarly, Bankimchandra "thoroughly assimilated the new ideas with the spirit of their country's thought and literature" (CH, 145). Due to the limits of his chronology, Dutt is forced to stop short of what others believe to have been Bankimchandra's departure from the notion that the destinies of East and West were intertwined.9 But he provides no indication that any such departure is in the offing, nor that his synthesis could account for either the radical nationalism of

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other English-educated intellectuals, such as Aurobindo Ghose, or Bankimchandra's own advocacy of a Hindu revival. Within his liberal nationalist paradigm, aesthetic achievement seems to transcend political ideology and cultural partisanship; with everything getting progressively better, the highest manifestations of the Hindu intellect will supercede its local peculiarities. This claim for universality takes on a political resonance once again as it matches Bengali writers to the timeless standards of great literature. Michael and Bankim perhaps outstrip the English in their attainment of universal stature; there is "nothing comparable." Access to universality becomes a kind of competition for relative cultural greatness; and it is precisely in the relativeness of the standard that the power of the local is renewed. The concluding chapter of The Cultural Heritage, an addition to the 1896 edition titled "General Intellectual Progress," contains postscripts on the contemporary activities of the Congress that describe it as a rather mild organization: "Political associations, strong in their influence and moderate in their representations, have also flourished.. . . The National Congress work of political progress. .. carries on a constitutional agitation with moderation and ability" (157). If Dutt was indeed able to show, or rather to convince, that Bengali culture had attained the stature of a true and equal partner in the struggle for intellectual recognition, the development of such a culture brought only limited returns in proving India's right to political and economic independence. At times it seems that a flourishing culture requires some sort of political subordination, and that Dutt would be willing to make the sacrifice of dependency for the sake of cultural improvement. Why, one wonders, would such pains be taken to illustrate the duration and breadth of the cultural heritage within the restricted bounds of colonial domination? What is the value, in short, of proving the cultural pedigree of the master's servant? The only answer possible in this context, it seems, is to rely on a deep-rooted faith in the liberal ideology of improvement, the belief that things will get better as the "utopian condition" of a "remote future." Leonard Gordon sees Dutt "in the utilitarian, liberal tradition . . . but a utilitarianism with an authoritarian twist. Dutt wanted the greatest good for the greatest number and felt the enlightened

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man could, would, and must speak for all."10 He deemed insecurity "the most evil state of life in which man could live." 11 The very last line of Dutt's history refers us to a present and a future that exist somehow out of time yet paradoxically still within reach, and which place the onus of continued progress on another cherished principle of European liberalism, that of self-help or individualism. It is ironic, given the constraints operating on Indians wishing to change the direction of British rule, but perfectly consistent with the Organicist argument, that Dutt projects the continuation of progress onto the shoulders of the subject-population itself: "It rests with ourselves whether, under the generous guidance of Europe, we shall move forward on the path of progress, as all English colonies are doing in this age of Progress" (CH, 163). Ill Two further components of liberal nationalist historiography combine in the early twentieth-century histories of Dinesh Chandra Sen and Sushil Kumar De. The first is a passionate commitment to illustrating and recovering the past cultural heritage of Bengali literature. The second is an equally passionate belief that the colonial influence had been for the most part beneficial, at least in the realm of literature, and that the nineteenth century expresses Bengal's brightest cultural moment. Sen's monumental History of the Bengali Language and Literature, delivered as lectures at Calcutta University from 1909 to 1911, contains extensive quotations even from mid-nineteenthcentury works, not only for the purpose of illustration but to preserve them from an advanced state of decay.12 Indeed, much of Sen's life and work was devoted to the discovery and preservation of old texts, and his History forms a kind of archaeological archive for the fragmentary record of a vanishing culture. De's efforts are well recorded in the preface to the first edition of his Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century, 1800-1825, where he writes that the description of the "dull and barren period" on which he is to embark is justified not only on its merits as a critical activity but also as an archaeological, recuperative one.13 This repeated emphasis on the organic transi-

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toriness of the cultural legacy carries with it a number of ideological imperatives, perhaps most poignant among them the contemporary sense of an indigenous literature being rapidly assimilated into the new cultural economy. Whether this process is viewed as a gradual devolution, as in Sen, or as a sudden and violent upheaval, as in De, both historians chart a "fall from grace" since English entry. Both imply the existence of a prelapsarian state of community in which "literature" represented the harmonious expression of a cohesive social unit. This theory of the historical break figures the colonial era as the interruption of a long-standing, self-contained society possessing its own inner logic of development and expression. The task of reclaiming culture, then, both from the dusty district libraries and from the onslaught of Western learning, likewise has a dual oppositional force: just as in Dutt's Cultural Heritage, Western learning asserts the familiar claim of parity in the competition for cultural greatness and organicizes the sources of that struggle; but in opposition to Dutt's embrace of Westernization as progress, both histories interrogate the notion that European influence has been "almost entirely beneficial," or that Bengali literature has become most fully itself under colonial rule. While neither goes so far as to reject the Renaissance paradigm, nor to critique British rule explicitly, both make far more substantial and detailed claims for the long continuity of Bengali culture and emphasize the radical upheaval within that tradition caused by colonialism. Whereas Dutt could conveniently bring this long continuity (from Vidyapati, if not Buddha) into harmony with the progressive wave of European influence, for Sen and De the tendencies of both cultures oscillate asynchronously and their proximity generates shock waves that ripple throughout Indian society. As opposed to Dutt's synthetic organicism, both historians utilize what White would term Contextualist arguments in charting the particulars of a field rather than its underlying spirit or essence, and in searching for a "relative integration of the phenomena discerned . . . in terms of 'trends' or general physiognomies of periods and epochs."14 One might say that the burden of history has shifted in the period from the 1890s to the 1910s, from large-scale assertions about the potential equality of cul-

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tures to proof that native culture is actually as complicated and multifaceted as anyone would care to imagine. Exactly how the "trends" or general characteristics of Bengali identity will emerge from this contextualist procedure provides these histories their distinct ideological personalities. Several implications follow the claims of duration and location. The most radical in terms of foreign acculturation is that the past greatness of Bengali literature is almost entirely unexplored. Bengali literature is a literature of the soil, and, like silt before the monsoon flood, it collects in every nook and cranny of the culture. Thus most of it will be inaccessible or invisible to the outsider. Only the native Bengali, who has access to local sources, can uncover and reveal the mysteries his people have kept hidden from the Careys and Joneses. A great deal of Sen's work, indeed, is the cataloguing of previously unknown repositories of the cultural legacy in district libraries and private collections. Though it is surely more than just that, the archaeological metaphor suggests a deep internalization that is almost an anthropology: the "meaning" of Bengali culture, which goes far beyond the printed productions of the modern era, is only in the possession of, and hence can only be known to, the native Bengali. Moreover, the longue durée evoked by the images of decay, preservation, and restoration in these histories arouses the feeling that vast tracts of the historical record remain unexplored, and that, despite the brilliant light of learning focused on the East by the Orientalists, far more mysterious goings-on remain lurking in the shadows. These shadows contain the potential of unlimited cultural resources, and their uncovering is not only a source of national pride but an ideological mission whose diligent completion may one day unearth secrets strong enough to oust the outsiders. At the same time, however, these two texts, published within ten years of each other against the backdrop of political extremism,15 display remarkable admiration (if not Dutt's veneration) for the influence of Western ideas. Both agree that the period immediately preceding their contemporary moment—from 1850 to the present, and including themselves—has been the most remarkable for the variety, copiousness, and brilliance of its literary output. Indeed, both histo-

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rians recognize their own efforts to be enabled and even required by the historic moment in which they live. This sense of contemporaneity, if not urgency, and of the transitory nature of the present as well as the past insinuates a certain radical edge to both histories, as if their stories must be told now in a specific conjuncture with contemporary events. Whereas Dutt, an actual politician, could project his liberal faith into a Utopian future he seemed confident would eventually come to pass, these two academic historians, writing within the following twenty-five years, seem much less sanguine about the shape of the present and charge their audiences with a moral and political responsibility in excess of liberal faith in the slow, inexorable march of progress. Neither, of course, can declare itself a rallying call to action; the threat of British censorship notwithstanding, there is little here that crosses the line from academic research into political activism. Yet both the narrative strategies and, to some extent, the tone of these histories, different as they are, suggest a kind of intellectual engagement with and intervention into the present that goes beyond vague reassurances or cultural cheerleading. The nature of such an intervention is as complex as the ideological makeup of the historians themselves. Although they recognize themselves to be enabled by the educational systems and historical methodologies of a foreign, imperial power, they also record the presence of that power as an interruption in the long continuity of their culture. Both, moreover, conclude that the full impact of that interruption has not yet been fully assessed by the native intelligentsia, and thus historiography can provide a certain tactical value in analyzing such a situation and possibly providing a course of action in the present. What direction that course might take is open to discussion, but both seem to agree that the trends of the past can illuminate the direction of the future, and that the time for discussion is now. In this sense, both historians' contextualist arguments maintain a significant affinity for the comic emplotment appropriate to Organicism, displayed most dramatically by their faith in the recuperative powers of Bengali literature to overcome its interruption and restore itself in the future. But both also posit a tragic moment of degeneration when the literature is separated from its internal

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principles of development and falls into chaos. Tragic emplotments, according to White, are germane to radical ideological implications, and it is undoubtedly this focus on the moment of British entry as interruption that provides them their political charge. This combination of rhetorical affinities lends these histories their particular fascination: just as we found the decidedly liberal Dutt emploting the cultural heritage within the comic, organic narratives that typically serve as the storytelling elements appropriate to conservative ideologies, with their patient recommendations to "stay the course," De and Sen are able to look both ways in judging the past and the future, observing a tragic past behind them as they stand poised on the threshold of a redemptive future. The value of the present is thus dialectically heightened as that liminal point through which the trends of history pass. The historiographical act, then, possesses extraordinary importance as an agent of historical change; recording the past, especially a tragic one, allows it to be canceled, preserved, and superseded. This historiographic aufhebung approximates the procedures of Hegel, whom White asserts "emplotted history on two levels— Tragic on the microcosmic, Comic on the macrocosmic—both of which are justified by appeal to a mode of argument that is Organicist, with the result that one can derive either Radical or Conservative ideological implications from a reading of his work."16 In one element alone this description fails to suffice for De and Sen: the liberal implication each historian eventually brings to his story. This is the point at which White's exhaustive cataloguing maneuver begins to lose some of its explanatory power for us. Perhaps in the colonial context the extreme pressure of an imposed cultural norm throws the rhetorical affinities of historiography into disarray. Liberalism, as Guha asserts, is truly the paradigm to be reinterrogated when exploring the colonial past; within its embrace coexist the most unlikely rhetorics as they struggle to make sense of a political environment that calls itself free but practices tyranny, that allows free speech only under certain conditions, that celebrates the rights of man without popular franchise or self-determination. Surprisingly enough, the liberal implication fits the contextualist mode most acceptably in White's scheme, where it finds its appropriate emplotment as Satire. Neither of these histories is predominantly

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satirical in tone, in the sense of being ironically derisive or parodie. Yet both meet the properly etymological criteria of satire in its classic sense of "sated," of having eaten one's fill, as both attempt to catalogue the historical record in the anatomical method familiar from Menippean satire. Both are massive compendia of facts; both call for exaggerated investments of commitment and responsibility from their readers in digesting and perhaps reproducing a comprehensive cultural literacy. Before we come to the liberal component in these nationalist histories, it is necessary to explicate some of their satiric strategies. Naturalization, by which foreign influence is brought within the organic embrace of the older and vaster cultural traditions of ancient India, is among their most pronounced. Both insist on tracing Bengali back to a high period of Hindu community before Muslim conquest, under which the culture does not "develop" per se but does retain a status "representative" of an ancient, unchanging structured whole. At this point the two separate strategies diverge: whereas Sen explains the nineteenth-century eruption as a devastating blow dealt to village communities by the influx of missionaries—in short, a sudden fall from grace—De traces a gradual dissolution of the rural social and economic structure, beginning under the Mughals, to fabricate a historical necessity for the revitalizing influx of Western ideas. In both accounts Western influence is something preceded and followed by immense reserves of "nativeness." Unlike the glorification of progress in Dutt, under whose aegis a transhistorical telos will one day make Bengali and British culture essentially the same, Sen and De envision a Hindu synthesis in which Western ideas, after an initial interruption, find their place among an enlarged pantheon of distinctively Indian attributes. Sen: Village life underwent a sudden disturbance . . . a sect of people came with the clear object of improving them spiritually and morally. . . . Bent on high motives of philanthropy and love, they did not apply force but used gentle persuasion.... (HBL, 716-17) For nearly a century enlightened Hindus were dazzled by the glare of western civilization. . . . The victory of the missionaries was complete . . . and poor Bengal may consider this love to have been the greatest of her disasters. . . . (.HBL, 724)

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But the incense still burns in the Hindu temples... the auspicious sound of the evening conch still resounds beyond the temples.. . . ( H B L , 799)

De: With the ruin of the zemindars and the degradation of the Brahmins [under the Mughals] who constituted respectively the aristocracy of wealth and the aristocracy of intellect, a process of disintegration had begun in the social fabric which ended in an absolute dissolution of all social solidarity. . . . (BLN, 32) Bengali literature had been set adrift to shift for itself as best it could, it was taken up and fostered by strangers hailing from distant lands whom for political, personal, or utilitarian reasons, if not always the love of the language or the literature itself, first urged its elaborate study under entirely new conditions.. .. (BLN, 50) Under the circumstances and in the environment such as they were, it could not have been otherwise. N o doubt the hour had come for such a regeneration and reconstruction. (BLN, 54)

These two historiographies myths—of the Fall, and of the Decadence—provide powerful vitalizing narratives that urge the rejuvenation and renaturalization of a cultural heritage stolen, albeit improved upon, by foreigners. Neither history is free from outright critique of British sovereignty, although the elements of such critique are embedded in a scrupulous self-censorship. De's history, in attempting to trace the "obscure origins of Modern Bengali literature" finds in the European incursion a "social and political" cause rather than a strictly "cultural" one. Clive's victory at Plassey is the "social and political cause of the great change," but there is no outstanding literary or more generally cultural influence to inspire the "great flood tide of literary Young Bengal" that reached its climax after 1858 (BLN, 1-2). In other words, the British social and economic incursion sows the seeds of cultural revolution without actually fomenting it; the foreign invaders, by driving out the corrupt Mughal regime, actually set the stage for Bengali culture to assert itself more completely. De's repeated invocation of the "barren and uninteresting" literary production of the years 1800-1825 attempts to drive home the message that the period

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of English aesthetic influence had a negligible effect on the renaissance of Bengali culture that flourished after Rammohun Roy. The implication is that if the inspiration for the renaissance did not come from English culture, English ideology cannot control it. It is, in effect, like Spinoza's God, an "absent cause." De's concentration on the "barren and uninteresting period between 1800-1825," on "the well-meaning but scarcely literary activity of the European writers," is thus a massive effort aimed at devaluing the ideological inspiration of European influence in order to illuminate the "strong countercurrent of native energy which found its vent in a body of indigenous poems and songs, standing, as they do, in direct contrast to the Europeans" (BLN, xi). That such enormous historiographic energy could be devoted to removing the perception of the European cultural legacy from the minds of nationalist Bengal surely points to the strength wielded on behalf of that assumption both by the colonizers themselves and by the native intelligentsia they trained and employed in the work of ideological reproduction. De's Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century, then, seems a book far more concerned with erasing the legacy of the English in Bengal than in exploring the subject matter of its title. As such it is an essay in negation, designed to preserve and embalm the colonial influence, to quarantine its influence so as to prevent further infection. In doing so, however, two strands of the English influence surreptitiously become unwound. The political and social "great change" of imperialist entry is seen as the sufficient cause that will unleash the "great flood tide" of Bengali cultural production—the socalled renaissance—after 1858. In contrast to this tumultuous social revolution, British ideological production is devalued: the comparatively "barren and uninteresting period from 1800-1825," along with the "dead season of fifty years which preceded the year 1800," form an ideological backwater of "well-meaning but scarcely literary" events (BLN, 3). Although De offers us perhaps the most graphic indictment of social disruption under the British to be found in any Bengali literary history of the period, his estimation of England's artistic effects on the colony remains confined to the derogatory judgment "scarcely literary." In this disjunction between the social and cultural levels of

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his analysis, something like a "moment of truth" can be found. For in isolating literary from social phenomena, D e is making claims for the autonomy of literature as a cognitive practice divorced from the drudgery—or revolutions—of social existence. Despite the fact that his history devalues the cultural achievements of the English in this respect, it nonetheless grants a privilege to the literary itself as a form of mental activity that is above the everyday realities of society, the humdrum business of administering a colony, the "barren and uninteresting" work of being colonized. By making "literary excellence" the provenance of the post-Mutiny Bengali writer, De's attack on the European legacy falls prey to the very same liberal ideology of aesthetic autonomy that his history attempts to dispel. The triumphant literary renaissance of modern Bengal will mark the exact moment at which aesthetic autonomy has passed to the Bengali, the very same moment at which the Bengali concedes the rest of the social whole— the economic, political, and legal structures that determine native existence—to the colonizer. Much as in Dutt's Cultural Heritage, a quiet emphasis asserts itself: aesthetic activity flourishes under strong government when it is freed from serving as the cultural repository of social customs, norms, rites, and taboos to range in the zodiac of individual wit. This apologia for individual greatness and the freedom of art is essentially liberal in its implications; it confidendy asserts a faith in the individual literary producer over the claims of society and community, and upholds the universality of great art's ability to transcend the contemporary constraints of foreign occupation, class alienation, or the estranging effects of foreign acculturation. That "the literary flood tide of Young Bengal" may have been what the colonizers had in mind does not occur to De, even as he offers a graphic account of the destruction of native society under Company rule. Critical as it is, this elevation of the Renaissance paradigm falls prey to what I have been arguing constituted a main ideological imperative of British rule, an ideology interpellating individuals as subjects through the machinery of the educational apparatus and through the various other institutions for the promotion of vernacular literature. The reification of the aesthetic as an autonomous component of cul-

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ture seemingly divorced from the realities of economic production, or rather, seeming to incorporate the rest of the social whole within its sphere, formed a powerful mediator of social discontent. British educational ideology encouraged the participation of natives in the privileged domain of high culture; economy and society could be left to those who knew how best to manage it. D. C. Sen's History of Bengali Language and Literature places the problematic linkage of ideology and the aesthetic at the center of its investigation of the modern period by focusing on the activities of the missionaries. Though Sen's chronology barely extends past the active career of Rammohun Roy in Calcutta (c. 1825), and he is nowhere as critical of colonial social practices as De, his account concentrates on the subtle infiltration of Christian morals and aesthetic ideas into the "representative" literature of the folk. As mentioned earlier, much of Sen's life was devoted to the archaeological discovery and preservation of the songs and literature of rural Bengal; only secondly is he thought of as an author who writes historical narratives and explanations. His work was primarily designed to provide an entry into nationalist culture for those sections of the society that would otherwise remain outside the cultural horizon of urbaneducated elites. All of which gives a critical charge to his satiric account of the contributions of the Rev. William Carey to the growth and development of Bengali prose. Carey, he writes, "had the object of bringing a large mass of humanity, whom he sincerely believed to be grovelling in darkness, to light... we regret that Dr. Carey failed to observe the religious life of Bengal" (HBL, 719). Of the reverend's efforts to reach the masses through his knowledge of the vernacular, Sen uncovers this confession: I spoke in Bengali for half an hour without intermission. . . . But I recollect that after I had preached or rather thought that I had, for two years (in Bengali), a man one day came to me and declared he could not understand me, and this long after my flattering teachers had declared that everyone could understand me. (HBL, 721)

This account of unintelligibility points to the heart of the ambivalence in the European cultural heritage bequeathed to Bengal.

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The contradictions are many and deep: the original missionaries, like Carey, may have been truly inspired by "love" in their attempts to provide Bengal with a standardized prose literature such as would serve a fitting instrument for the translation of the Bible. But the language thus created was an artificial one, severed both from the literary Bengali of the royal courts and from the spoken language of the people. Likewise, the training of Bengalis in this language, while providing them with a new means of expression and the benefits of Western contact, at once separated them from the mother tongue and from the social relations that accrued around and supported it. This official or "missionary Bengal," as it was called, never caught on. Nonetheless, the missionaries had a lasting impact. De's description of the Bengali Bible is hilarious for its satiric deflation of its producers' expectations. "The reader will note that the translation is not only imperfect and crude, the grammar incorrect, the idiom faulty, the syntax crabbed and obscure, but also the whole thing looks like an absolutely foreign growth vainly attempted to be acclimatized in Bengali" (BLN, 100). Despite the awkwardness of missionary Bengali, however, Sen records its progress into the "heart": The secret of their success, I beg to repeat, lay in their approaching us with love. . . . Their charity, devotion, zeal and sympathy had drawn away those who were the natural ornaments of our society, and poor Bengal may consider this love to have been the greatest of her disasters, since more than the sword it upset time-honoured hoary institutions and alienated "true hearts."

(HBL, 856)

"Love" triumphs over language. Sen's parable of unintelligibility serves as the organizing myth for a complex of social and cultural disturbances, the history of which permeates his account of the modern period. These disturbances are charted as the fall of the "representative character" of the language from an instrument of expression to one of domination. Carey's Dialogues, for example, used for training Europeans in the Bengali language, attained sufficient fluency and grace to have been copied by early native writers. But at the same time, according to Sen, they contained "slang of a most revolting sort used most freely" (HBL, 727). The inspiration offered by

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this language to Bengali prose writers was widespread, but resulted in works of inferior quality in the early years of cultural activity— the "barren and uninteresting" period covered by De. Under the instruction of the College of Fort William, writes Sen, "works written by Bengali authors in this period mainly follow European models in style, and the best of them, making all possible allowances, scarcely possess the worth of second-class literary productions, [while] others are mere translations of European works" (.HBL, 746). Devised by Europeans and used by European-educated natives, the new language completed the breakup of the native social structure begun by the entry of British capital. The old literature of Bengal was truly representative. . . . But towards the end of the 18th century, the Vaisnavas and Saktas were practically driven out of the field. . . . Europeans and chiefly missionaries . . . trained the Pandits to write Bengali—not as they would have it, but as their European masters wanted it.. .. (HBL, 766) Sanskrit scholars were called in to write Bengali books [with] no mass appeal. Modern literature thus lost its representative character. It was a foreign plant grafted on to an old tree. . . . Our old literature was, as it were, walled up, and a new one substituted which the people found inaccessible . . . thus Bengalis ceased for half a century to understand the literary Bengali of this age . . . [it was] cumbersome and corrupt. . . . (HBL, 769-70) When Bengali literature had thus been placed in inexpert hands and committed to pedantic follies . . . European writers of Bengali cut a new channel of their own and made the style of vernacular prose flow into it. (HBL, 771) When Sen finally turns his attention to the cultural monuments of modern Bengal, such as the works of Rammohun Roy, we find that the ambivalent legacy of English influence becomes a constitutive fact of his description. Although Sen will not go so far as to question the notion of a cultural renaissance inspired by European contact, his assessment of Rammohun's contributions as "the father of Modern Bengali" is fraught with ambiguity. It is possible to detect the tones of irony in the following sentences, which, if read one way, preserve the vision of an enlightened and progressive cultural revival: "His writing materially assisted Government in enacting legislation for the administration of the country on a more

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solid and efficacious basis. His letter on the question of education preceded the memorable minute of Lord Macaulay and sounded the keynote of the future educational policy of the Government" (HBL, 789). The passage needs only a slight inflection, however, to turn it into a bitter castigation of a collaborationist policy that "materially assisted" the destruction of rural Bengal and ensured the production of a comprador class for which Macaulay provided the blueprint, and Rammohun the human labor. How, then, are we to read the provocative last line of this work? Read or heard by audiences in 1911, barely five years after Partition and at the height of the extremist movement in Calcutta, it could scarcely have seemed believable to any cultured gathering: "under British rule we are in enjoyment of the manifold benefits of peace. This has caused the rapid and astonishing growth of prose within the past century" (HBL, 840). Given the strict attention Sen has focused on the debilitating ideological effects of the British standardization of Bengali language and literature, this passage can almost be read as a reversal or undoing of the logic of causality itself; so displaced, it stands the very logic of improvement and progress on its head: the rapid and astonishing growth of prose within the past century has caused us to suffer the manifold pains of ideological war. Yet, read or heard in English by an audience of English-educated intellectuals, it may have seemed a mirror image of Dr. Carey's unintelligible soliloquy. *

*

*

While several distinct forms of literary history were written throughout the twentieth century, the majority stayed within the well-worn track of liberal nationalism. After Independence this dominant idiom of historiography quickly became part of the ideological state apparatus, with the Sahitya Akademi commissioning official literary histories of all the regional languages. Sukumar Sen's History of Bengali Literature (i960) sounded the keynote of India's dream of national unity and of achieving cultural equality with the West as part of a more comprehensive political and economic part-

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nership: Tagore's Nobel prize "was of tremendous significance for India, being the first recognition of contemporary India as an equal partner in the assembly of the men of letters of the free and progressive world."17 A similar assumption guided the estimate of Buddhadev Bose: "Rabindranath . . . made Bengal a part of Europe, and the Bengalis citizens of the world."18 Radical nationalist histories early in the century, as well as Marxist histories of the following period, attempted to rectify the false image that a sophisticated literary culture signified a more comprehensive political or economic "equality" for colonial/postcolonial India.

2 Radical Nationalist Histories

and recuperative tendencies of the liberal nationalist paradigm, a countercurrent of cultural historiography existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that was politically committed to the immediate overthrow of British rule. One of the most prominent figures in this movement, both intellectually and politically, was a native Bengali educated at Cambridge. Aurobindo Ghose spent thirteen of his first twenty years in England. He returned to India in 1892, after failing the test for admission into the Indian Civil Service, and became an English professor in Baroda while undertaking an intensive "renationalization." In 189394 he began to agitate against the moderation of the Congress in unsigned articles published from Bombay. According to his autobiography, his provocations eventually helped to inspire the founding of an Extremist wing within the Congress, which, through the support of Lala Lajpat Rai, Bepin Pal, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and others, wrested control from the Moderates in 1918 and set the nationalist movement on a more aggressive course that would soon include Non-cooperation and Civil Disobedience. Other studies, as well as firsthand accounts of Aurobindo's dealings during the Congress sessions of 1906-1909 ascribe rather less weight to his influence.1 He was extremely influential during the Swadeshi period surrounding the Partition of Bengal from 1905 to 1908, when, according to Sumit Sarkar, his "terrorist heroism evoked tremendous admiration from very wide circles of educated Indians."2 However, in the estimation of Sarkar and many subsequent historians, the terrorist legacy actually hindered a broadening of the independence struggle at that time. A L O N G S I D E THE ASSIMILATIONIST

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The "British Administration was never in serious danger of collapsing. . . . The intense religiosity of most of the early secret societies . .. helped to keep Muslims aloof or hostile. . . . And religion could also become a royal road for an honorable retreat."3 Aurobindo retired from politics in 1909, after being charged with terrorism and sedition in the famous Alipore bomb case, partly in response to government pressure and partly because of religious conviction. He founded an ashram in French Pondicherry and devoted the rest of his life to writing and meditation. The locus of Aurobindo's radicalism shifted dramatically over the course of his career. An early series of articles on Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1894), contemporaneous with the revised edition of Dutt's Cultural Heritage, shows him competing in the battle for parity, which we have noticed characterized the historiographical practice of the liberal nationalist writers. His familiarity and competition with the English standard is not surprising given his Cambridge education. Interestingly, however, the battle is waged in inflated linguistic terms, seemingly signifying an immediate rejection of English language and literature. This was not at all the case among the liberal historians, who largely believed the English intervention, however disruptive of tradition, to have been beneficial to the continuing progress of Bengali culture. Aurobindo's emphasis on the development of linguistic virtuosity among the Bengalis during the nineteenth century is designed from the first to have far-reaching effects. Bankim is far superior to the English novelists Henry Fielding and Walter Scott; he is equaled only by Shakespeare and "the supreme genius, George Meredith" (!) 4 Once again, the familiar refrain of universal genius is sounded. But the language Bankim created is more than merely aesthetic: it has uncovered again "those magnificent possibilities, latent in every Sanskritic language, which only wait for the magic touch of original genius to open out their store; and they set flowing that perennial fountain of gracious and noble poetry which is doing so much to bring beauty and high feeling into our lives and to produce a race of Bengalis braver and better than we" (BCC, 32, my emphasis). It is unclear exactly how language, or the Sanskritic legacy, accomplishes this empowering of the "race," but it is interesting to

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note that their "magnificent possibilities" are set alight by "original genius." This seeming dependency on the individual to inspire the masses will resurface at all stages of his career. Turning back to the European metaphor, Aurobindo asserts (as had Bankimchandra back in 18705) that the Bengalis are the Italians of India, and, like the Italians in the quattrocento, they will lead the rest of India into its renaissance (beginning in 1894) through the twin virtues of "literature and learning." Aurobindo in fact asserts that the Bengali genius, which is the genius of all India ("for what Bengal thinks tomorrow, India will be thinking tomorrow week" [BCC, 38]), is most pronounced in language. Of the many facets of social existence in which Indians have excelled, "Literature and learning are the provinces in which the Bengali is fitted to have kingship, and of the two literature rather than learning" (BCC, 37). Indeed, "our hope in the future" seems to subsist almost solely on the further development of creative writing, which embodies nothing less than the nation itself: "Young Bengal gets its ideas, feelings and culture not from schools and colleges, but from Bankim's novels and Rabindranath Tagore's poems; so true is it that language is the life of a nation" (BCC, 39). The genius manifested in Bankim's fiction proves the intellectual superiority of Bengali over English culture; Bengal is practically as advanced as Greece, which "has alone presented the world an unbroken succession of supreme geniuses" (BCC, 39), and this cultural efflorescence justifies, in fact demands, a territorial correlative. The right to nationhood stems direcdy from the eloquence of a culture: "The dialect of Bengal is no longer a dialect, but has become the speech of Gods, a language unfading and indestructible which cannot die except with the death of the Bengali nation" (BCC, 40). This political element, nationality, is presented as the modern incarnation of the Sanskritic "perennial fountain," and in a sense would be its truest expression, for language and literature are but manifestations of a higher synthesis, the "Hindu intellect," which recurs throughout time, clothing itself in the garments appropriate to its temporal appearance on the world stage. If since i860 it has inhabited the form of Bankimchandra in order to compete with the universalizing pretensions and global dominance of English literature and

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culture, in the late nineteenth century the highest form of its spiritual embodiment will appear to be the nation itself. Writing in 1894, it would not have been difficult for Aurobindo to articulate this demand for nationhood explicitly in print.6 Later statements, however, show Aurobindo's political radicalism to have always possessed a certain hopeful vagueness, an indecision that can be read also through his combination of narrative elements. We can quickly detect what seem to be the synthetic continuities of the organicist argument in Aurobindo's "perennial fountain," as well as the remote future possibility so characteristic of the liberal ideological implication, of "producing] a race of Bengalis braver and better than we." However, Aurobindo recounts his romantic tale of Bengali nationhood with a narrative style closer to the mechanist than the organicist argument, for rather than the integrative and processual maneuvers of organicism, Aurobindo's vision of the past is guided by strict laws of development that stem from the scriptural certainties of Hindu cosmology, now charged with the radical ideological affinity most appropriate to that form of story. Mechanist arguments posit the organization of the historical field into laws of development rather than discrete occurrences or long-term processes, and are "inclined to be reductive rather than synthetic."7 To yoke radicalism to the mechanist argument, as in Marx's canonical combination, is to assert that, the laws of history being understood, change can be effected through the application of such laws on existing institutions to bring about their cataclysmic transformation. In contrast to the "natural" or "social" rhythms of conservative and liberal ideologies, respectively, radical thinkers favor the rational and scientific over the convenient or the comfortable, and their visions of progress often stress the difficulty and disruption necessary to transform the status quo into stricter compliance with its underlying structures.8 Understanding the laws of development, Aurobindo can thus emplot the British incursion as merely a moment of ebb in the cosmic surging of the "perennial fountain." He does not intend this as a mythic construct, however, but as a scientific law recovered by his research on Sanskrit historians. According to the Shastric logic of theyugct; vast cycles of decay and rebirth recur

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throughout time, with the present or kaliyugct exhibiting the severest decadence. In Aurobindo's judgment, the ka-liyuga is drawing to a close and the apocalypse is close at hand. That the concept of the yuga is utterly beyond human time, and therefore inconvenient (to say the least) as a measure for the imminence of radical change, much less as a guide to practical action, is a complication I will explore below.9 Aurobindo's radical, mechanistic narrative is emplotted not as tragedy but as romance, the recurring, mythic evocation of Paradise and its restoration. This choice evidently originates in his belief that an uncontaminated Sanskrit source forms the underlying identity of Bengali culture and that it can be regained. This will create tremendous difficulties of allegiance for a united Bengali population comprised almost equally of Hindus and Muslims, as Sarkar has observed. Ironically, it was also one of the justifications given by British authorities for the Partition of the province between its disproportionately Hindu and Muslim halves in the first place, to each of whom it extended promises of greater representation on the basis of its religious affiliation. Additionally, the mythology of a single Sanskrit source that could be unlocked to reveal the deep truths of Indian society in order to better control it had formed a staple subject of early Orientalism.10 Finally, the practical dilemma of reasserting a spurious set of Sanskritic "traditions" over the modernizing force of European ideas would have seemed to militate against this vision as a practical political strategy. Nonetheless, Aurobindo pursued the vision relentlessly until his death in 1950. It seems so impractical one almost wants to see in it an ingenious intention, the kind of sly reciprocity Frantz Fanon attributes to the colonized, who learn to "substantify" the violence of the colonial stereotype by embracing it and becoming the colonizer's Other.11 Aurobindo did not leave a record of such self-consciousness, but the modern romance he constructed of essential Indianness has powerful mobilizing potential to this day. If not representatively Bengali, it does make an effort to be all-Indian. Romance, as Northrop Frye and others have posited, is the narrative form of the wish-fulfillment dream, the ultimate victory of desire over the forces that restrain it, resulting in the eventual transcendence of man over the world.12 Aurobindo ingeniously em-

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plots the cyclic, cosmic time of the yuga as a uniquely Indian, even modern, romance by which the reassertion of Sanskritic values will take place in a temporal space accessible to human intervention, a humanized cosmology. Bankimchandra is the first wandering knight we encounter in this quest-romance. Radicalism has to start somewhere, and Aurobindo was impatient waiting for the remote, Utopian progress promised by liberal historians. Daunted by the practical impossibility of achieving a Bengali nation "now," Aurobindo's narrative strategy furnished powerful techniques for later writers wishing to combat European acculturation through an invented tradition that could bring superhuman conceptions of time within the purview and control of human agents. The demolition of a Muslim mosque on the supposed birth site of the mythical Hindu god-king Rama in 1994 illustrates the power wielded by such mytho-historical narratives in India today. Aurobindo's interpretation of Bankimchandra provided the occasion for a historiography that simultaneously cut both ways: its attainment of Swaraj was more imminent than that promised by the liberals, and it was more radical than the conservative passivity of a Hindu orthodoxy that attempted to ignore the English presence. Paradoxically, the radical assertion of cultural change in the present harks back to the Utopian past of the "perennial fountain"; radicalism articulates itself as the immediate recovery of an undiluted past to which it hopes to restore power in the future. Everything in between is corrupt in this kaliyuga. Aurobindo will have to erase the present. Bankim's character is offered as an example of the "traditional" honesty, integrity, and intellect of the Bengali Brahmin, a racial/ casteist construct that is intended to openly compete with that of the ideological image of the English administrator, forcing the latter to live up to its self-description. Bankim's career as deputy magistrate was marked by diligent attention to justice, which occasionally got him into trouble with colonial authority. Justice emerges as an ultimate good here, an abstract ideal that cannot be implemented by its self-appointed guardian, the British administration. Bankim prosecuted both English indigo planters and native outlaws, and "By a little quiet decisiveness he had broken the back of two formidable

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tyrannies and given an object lesson in what a Government can do when it heartily intends the good of the people" (BCC, 15).13 His famous run-ins with bureaucracy show him as proud and defiant, a warrior in bureaucrat's clothing. The true measure of Bankim's greatness was in offering to the Bengali people their own medium of expression, which is seen to possess the potential to eventually drive the English "out of the field." "When a Mahratha or a Gujerati has any thing important to say, he says it in English; when a Bengali, he says it in Bengali" (BCC, 3435). Bankim's work "marks an important stage in the great revolution of sentiment which our literary class has set going, the revolution of sentiment which promises to make the Bengalis a nation" (BCC, 35). It is surely one of the many paradoxes of the colonial situation that Aurobindo must write these words in English. Another is that he seems to have adopted from two strands of the aesthetic ideology of English Romanticism, well represented in English-supported Indian schools at the time: the belief that literature can bring about social revolutions ("Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world"), and the affective notion, so important to John Stuart Mill, that sensibility is the proof and glue of a people's cohesion as a social unit, that Englishness or Bengaliness can be quantified in and through literature as evidence of a distinctly national taste. If the sensibility can be proved distinctly national, the next step is to claim its right to a homeland. Inextricably intertwined with Aurobindo's elevation of the Hindu "character" over English or Muslim is a form of virulent linguistic nationalism, reminiscent of another group of European Romantics, the Jacobins. This strain of Bengali regional/religious chauvinism, so potentially disabling to a politician working within the pan-Indian structure of the National Congress, or within the multiethnic population of Bengal, is difficult to attribute to either political expediency or philosophical conviction. Politically, it would mobilize a small fragment of upper-caste, educated elites; philosophically, the romance form represents the world of magic and infinite possibility, so theoretically at least Aurobindo would have been free within it to construct any utopic Hindu-Muslim combinatoire he saw

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fit. Instead, Sarkar reports a grim figure illustrating the exclusiveness of the Extremist legacy: "In a 1918 official list of 186 killed or convicted revolutionaries, no less than 165 came from the three upper castes, Brahman, Kayastha, and Vaidya."14 Leonard Gordon offers a more sympathetic view: Aurobindo's messianism is attributable to "birth, training, political role, martyrdom by imprisonment and especially the fact that he was chosen by God for glorious and important work."15 In a final paradox, given his high regard for Bengali language, Aurobindo would begin in 1909 the English translation of Bankim's most explicitly anti-British novel, Anandamath.16 Why is it necessary to inform English speakers of the power of Bengali literature to "make the Bengalis a nation"? In an awkward reference to his own experience with the Civil Service, Aurobindo asserts that Bengali literature is attaining the freedom and greatness the Indian people cannot achieve politically or socially. "O sage politicians, and subtle economists, whose heads run on Simultaneous Examinations . . . what a lesson is here for you! Not in this way shall we exalt ourselves in the scale of nations . . . but by things of which your legal wisdom takes little cognizance, by noble thoughts, by high deeds, by immortal writings" (BCC, 40). Literature is overvalued to accomplish the goals that politics and history cannot. There are concrete similarities between the philosophical idealism of revolutionary terrorism and the Romantic ideology of the aesthetic. Both rely on unseen forces to manifest an ineffable universality that is nonetheless tangible and sensuous. The notion of aesthetic greatness, like the existence of the "perennial fountain," is ultimately unprovable, based on subjective judgment, although prompted by material reality. Great literature and divine law are both transcendent and local simultaneously: we know them by their effects—the details of a specific miracle or the metrical perfection of a line of poetry—to which we impute the existence of a source we cannot glimpse in its totality. They are at once empirically real and imaginatively infinite. Kant stated this succinctly in the Critique of Judgement, where he defines "taste" as "the universal communicability of sensation (satisfaction or dissatisfaction) without the aid of a concept."17 Unfortunately, Bankim's "immortal writings"

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would have to be translated to be communicated in this way. Once again, the aspiration of Bengali civilization to "the scale of nations," to true equality, would have to pass first through English comprehension. The realization of the Sanskrit raj in the present age, too, required believers for which it would fight and die. Aesthetic transport can resemble messianic election; revolutionary fervor can seem to prove that redemption is at hand, even when the ultimate source of that redemption is measured in cosmic time. In his later religious seclusion and his shift from political radicalism to a philosophic conservatism, Aurobindo continued to use a mechanist mode of argument to bring to light the scriptural "laws" for the reincarnation of the ancient glory of the Indian character, a character in the process of "rearising" after a period of "great decline." From the relative quiet of the Pondicherry ashram, he continued to refine his philosophico-religious notions into what became a universalizing spiritual humanism. In his 1918 articles in the nationalist newspaper Arya,18 Aurobindo explicitly borrowed a conception of "Indian spirit" from Anandamath: an amalgam of spirituality, creativity, and intellect personified as Shakti, the Mother goddess, awakening from a long sleep. India's past greatness, which (by now) had surpassed even the grandeur of Greek civilization, had never wholly disappeared. On the contrary, and in accordance with the historical laws of the spiritual universe that dictate yugas of decline and rebirth, India is beginning another such cycle, which will "become a thing of immense importance both to herself and the world" (it/, 1). Aurobindo does not mention that Bankimchandra's conception of Shakti as mother, in particular a mother representing the Indian "nation," is anachronistic, a construction of contemporary neo-Hinduism attempting to concretize and codify its practices in the colonial era in order to reconstitute Hindu ritual to compete with the rationalized religion of modern Christianity. Rather, Aurobindo presents it as the pure recovery of an unalloyed Hindu past. Interestingly, he does so without citing a textual tradition, knowing that the ritual mass of everyday Hindu practice could not be culled from putative "scripture." He did not even attempt to compete in this Eurocentric gesture of textual authenticization.

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The neo-traditional concept of power as national strength is, then, broadcast backward into the past, filtering older Hindu concepts through an ideological grid crosshatched by the demand for nationhood. However, unlike the theory of the break elaborated in De and Sen, the rebirth of Indian civilization is not externally motivated by foreign intrusion—the British conquest is barely mentioned in the text's seventy-seven pages—but will simply occur as the reassertion of a long-dormant truth. "The present is only a last deposit of the past at a time of ebb; it has no doubt also to be the startingpoint of the future, but in this present all that was in India's past is still dormant, it is not destroyed" ( R I , 20-21). It would necessitate a long detour to examine exactly how a "Hindu orthodoxy" is being invented here to serve the immediate political demands of radicalism. Suffice it to say that neo-Hinduism in the mechanist mode borrows from both traditional religion and European Enlightenment thought to appropriate a past that can explain the present as an indigenous development, and places the burden and power of agency back into individual, local hands when it might seem more accurate to attribute present conditions to an occupying army. Aurobindo thus attributes the decline of India to a circumstance wholly internal to the natural evolution of the Indian mind following the prescribed laws of indigenous history. In an unlucky coincidence, "It was at that moment that the European wave swept over India" (RI, 25); "at the moment Europe came in upon us, we were in a state of ebb and weakness . . ." (RI, 71). The European wave did include a component of destruction, but in an implicit, pointedly anti-Muslim reference, Aurobindo says it swept away only what was already rotten and miraculously "revived" the qualities of the Indian mind that had followed an internal course of natural decline. The most dynamic tendency of the historical present is a process of new creation in which the spiritual powers o f the Indian mind remains [sic] supreme, recovers its truths, accepts whatever it finds sound or true, useful or inevitable of the modern idea and form, but so transmutes and indianises it, so absorbs and so transforms it entirely into itself that its foreign character disappears and it becomes another harmonious element in the characteristic working o f the ancient goddess, the Shakti of India master-

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ing and taking possession of the modern influence, no longer possessed or overcome by it. (RI, 31) Anticipating the reassessment that will be taken up by Marxist critics of the next decades, Aurobindo asserts that previous attempts at assimilating the European influence—the so-called "renaissance" that began with Rammohun Roy—have been disastrous, a "false method" (RI, 35). Imitation of the English has produced only "painful copyists, clumsy followers" (RI, 35). However, unlike the Marxist critics who claimed India failed to modernize under colonial rule sufficiently to attain the state of development that would allow it to break decisively from the British, Aurobindo asserts that the true value of the modernizing English influence has been to force India to "recover.. . the ancient sense and spirit" of the past, and to "bring out of them a new light. . . . to recover . . . the national poise . . ." (RI, 37). "Bankim Chandra Chatterji and Tagore . . . illustrate the stages of this transition" (RI, 39). This subtle yet insistent recourse to personality is interesting. As in Aurobindo's early articles on Bankimchandra, individual "genius" still makes its mark on the destiny of the Indian mind as it is reincarnated in the nineteenth-century religion of nationalism. Individual great minds still direct the appearance of the Indian mind in its modern avatar, and its universal truth is increasingly measured in its phenomenal appearances. Contrary to expectations, Aurobindo's religious retirement seemed to produce an even more individualistic psychology than his romantic terrorism. Common to both is a conception of willful volition inspiring massive social change. Neither seems appropriate to its expected communitarian form, and in this similarity both reveal a conception of individuality that seems out of place for its time. How does one locate this conception of individuality? Does it belong to the so-called "European disease" of individualism, or is it part of an overall strategy? The argument for individualism would seem to be denied by Aurobindo's larger narrative, which claims these representative men as advances toward the past, defying the liberal logic whereby the development of Bengali literature expresses the increasing modernity and progress of Indian

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society under European influence. As historically improbable as this schema sounds, it would make a fascinating point of departure for a reassessment of the many ways in which both Bankimchandra and Tagore have been configured in literary history for alternate ends. Reversing his earlier claim that "the dialect of Bengal . . . has become the speech of Gods," Aurobindo asserts that the true spirit of the Indian renaissance is not fully manifest in either present-day culture or politics. Literature "show[s] an increasing return to the Indian spirit in fresh forms . . ." but "No utterance of the highest genius . . . has yet made itself heard" ( R I , 56). This is a refreshing rejoinder to the Tagore myth. Politically, the legacy of extremism inspired by Partition and the Swadeshi movement "has awakened the people . . . proclaimed a religion of Indian patriotism, applied the notion of the ancient religion and philosophy to politics, expressed the cult of the Mother and Shakti and attempted to base the idea of democracy firmly on the spiritual thought and impulses native to the Indian mind" (RI, 57). But here, too, Aurobindo finds that something fundamental is lacking in the present-day personalities of Indian culture. A radical break with the present "forms of life" is required, which, when accomplished, will catapult the Indian mind backward into the timeless sublimity of "divine law." This law has always persisted quiedy, beneath or behind the earthly forms of the Indian reality, and when revealed will result in utopia regained. As for another mechanist historian, Alexis de Tocqueville, who "appropriately" viewed the impossibility of man's redemption in a tragic mode, for Aurobindo the spiritual redemption of man and the political recognition of the nation were inevitable. They were not to be realized in secular time, but were to be sought in individual spiritual fulfillment. Only a radical break with the present could provide the possibility for that future. As in his own life, this vision of history could posit no real social solution to the colonial dilemma, and while it resulted in some fascinating twists to the romance plot, it offered no concrete agenda to bring Independence to pass. As Aurobindo's political convictions grew increasingly radical, his narrative choices as a historian were forced into unlikely juxtapo-

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sitions, resulting finally in the improbable political choice, as well as tropological structure, of a "radical conservative"—a historian who desired to reassert a strict and unbroken continuity with the ancient Indian tradition, and a politician who understood that such a program demanded the immediate, radical termination of 150 years of British rule. These political inclinations forced his narrative apparatus to adjust accordingly. Radicalism as a political ideology tends to combine well with the tragic emplotments of the mechanist argument: the "laws of history" revealed inexorably point to imminent change. A religious vision, especially one promoting revolution, cannot accept tragedy as its program for the future. Aurobindo's invention of neo-Hinduism, with its scientifically inflected "divine laws," "spiritual truths," and godly embodiments, allowed him to resituate the tragic claims of radicalism within the larger matrix of an ordered universal cosmology, perceived as eternally dictating the contours of the Indian mind. The reassertion of the Indian mind could occur spiritually or culturally, but could not decisively redirect the actual political and economic structures of colonial rule. Thus the Indian mind triumphed, as did the hero of the quest romance, in an individualistic or psychological dimension that had little effect on the outward forms of life. The synthesis achieved by merging political radicalism with theophilosophic conservatism could not generate sufficient heat to ignite the spark of revolution. The revolutionary potential unleashed in this combination proved at this time to be more individualistic than social. Gordon records Aurobindo conversing directly with God; 1 9 Sumit Sarkar describes the message: "The Mother asks us for no schemes, no plans, no methods. She herself will provide the schemes, the plans, the methods."20 What the renaissance finally means for Aurobindo is an expression of the Indian spirit that does not seem realizable in the "practical forms of life," but rather infuses itself throughout a holistic vision in which the material and spiritual life, East and West, past and future, are synthesized into a religious harmony. The various levels of culture are all seen to share in a similar spiritual essence; philosophy, art and literature, science, politics, society, and economy form a "spiritual

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culture" whose goals are best expressed by the visionary's redefinition of human association: "a framework of life within which man can seek for and grow into his real self and divinity, secondly, an increasing embodiment of the divine law of being in life, thirdly, a collective advance towards the light, power, peace, unity, harmony of the diviner nature of humanity which the race is trying to evolve" (70). It is a curious but not uncommon transformation from radical conspirator to religious visionary. The power of Aurobindo's vision is still strongly felt on the contemporary political scene, but its relevance to the subsequent development of historiographical realism is tenuous.

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i O N E OF T H E FIRST D I F F E R E N C E S between nationalist and Marx-

ist accounts o f anti-imperialism is the greater mimiationalism o f the latter. This distinction informed the historic origins o f the C o m m u nist Party o f India ( C P I ) in the 1920s, w h i c h was founded, in part, t o strategically counter the Congress Party's m o v e m e n t for national independence. Naren Bhattacharya (alias Manabendra Nath Roy) . . . came into contact with the Bolshevik Mikhail Borodin in Mexico in 1919, helped to found a Communist Party there, and went to Russia in the summer of 1920 to attend the second Congress of the Communist International. Here he embarked on a celebrated and significant controversy with Lenin concerning the strategy of Communists in the colonial world. Lenin urged the necessity of broad support to the predominandy bourgeois-led national movements in the colonies and semi-colonies; Roy with the enthusiasm and sectarianism of a new convert argued that the Indian masses were already disillusioned with bourgeois-nationalist leaders like Gandhi and were "moving towards revolution independendy of the bourgeois-nationalist movement." The attitude towards the "national bourgeoisie" and the nationalist mainstream in general would remain the basic issue in Communist controversies in India and elsewhere down to and even beyond independence.1 Nationalist t h o u g h t in b o t h its liberal and radical varieties, while it addressed itself to the claims for sovereignty o f the Indian nation, often saw itself as participating in a global process o f enlightenment at the end o f w h i c h all cultures w o u l d share in a c o m m o n civiliza-

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tion. Early Marxists such as Roy saw this as a false universalism based on the cultural standards of bourgeois hegemony. Recall R. C. Dutt: "we shall move forward on the path of progress, as all English colonies are doing in this age of Progress" (CHB, 163). Though this claim to world civilization sounds forced in describing the seeming singularity of the Hindu mind posited by Aurobindo, Aurobindo too strained to prove that Indian culture deserved recognition from the wider world. Bengali was as great as Italian or Greek culture (or of course English culture), and Aurobindo verified it by equating Bankimchandra to "the supreme genius, George Meredith" (BCC, 27). At its worst, the battle for parity could devolve into a competitive pluralism, each side countering the others' cultural monuments with arguments for admission to a universal pantheon, as in Bose's claim that Tagore made India "an equal partner in the assembly of the men of letters of the free and progressive world," or Kumudnath Das's assertion that the Poet "must have awakened in all parts of the civilized world a real desire to know the up-to-date history of Bengali Literature." The political dangers of pluralism should be evident in the colonial context. Insofar as its values are considered relative, the pluralist pantheon begins from the center and grudgingly includes the peripheries only when they are seen to measure up to the existing standard. "Measuring up" implies a strong dose of "becoming like" in order to be measured at all. Tagore's Gitcmjali, the volume of poems for which he was awarded the Nobel prize, is a case in point.2 Pluralism begins from the concrete, observable differences between cultures and abstractly posits a unity in which cultures can intermingle, freed from (or cleansed of) the material determinants of their practical reality. This abstract unity will always bear traces of the difference from which it begins, and thus will always remain partial in its inclusiveness. "Literature" in its colonial usage frequently illustrated this spurious commonality. Marx began from the opposite premise, which is stated in his eighth thesis on Feuerbach (1845): "Social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which mislead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice."3 While the early Marx clearly stated that all humans were fun-

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damentally similar as embodiments of abstract labor at the species level, the goal of materialist analysis was to explain the extraordinary range of difference in their practical forms of life. In this sense Marxism is not a humanism. It cares little for the reduction of human activity to its abstract similarities, although it has posited certain fundamental laws of production, distribution, and consumption that it holds as constant within the history of human civilization. More important to materialist science are the varieties of practical forms these laws take, everywhere mediated by the ineluctable modalities of the material through which they pass. The great communist revolutions of this century, in their definitive variance from the Marxian modes of production script and their uncanny ability to improvise in practice without theoretical precedent, testify to the absolute value of material specificity in understanding and effecting social change. Similarly, in the realm of consciousness or ideology, differences in thought are based on the structure of material relationships pertaining in different societies, rather than on inviolable human truths. The German Ideology, written just after Marx's notes on Feuerbach, illustrates a similar concern for the specific material relations pertaining in different societies: "The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the domidominant material relationships grasped as ideas."4 For all this attention to the material realities of discrete locations, however, the young Marx remained puzzled by the ability of great literature to endure beyond the moment of its production. The question of culture is posed as an unanswerable riddle in the remarkable collection of notebooks referred to as the Grundrisse, written in 1857-1858 and finally published in 1939-41 as Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy: Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer's bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish? But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an attainable model.5

This ambiguity regarding the "relative autonomy" of aesthetic satisfaction haunts early Indian Marxist accounts of colonial culture

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as well. The ambiguity should not be attributed to the Marxist tradition alone, however, for we have seen a similar difficulty in evaluating the aesthetic operative in the well-worn tracks of both liberal and radical nationalist thought. Part of the problem can be attributed to the concept of universality with which all of the historians examined so far have been working. Just as R. C. Dutt attributed the progress of Bengali culture to a global teleology in which all of England's colonies took part, Aurobindo isolated justice and the right to national determination as transcultural norms, equally the province of the traditional Bengali Brahman and the English supreme court judge. But these norms were clearly not upheld by the British. This indicated the real nature of power to be in the manufacture of universal standards. The practical violation of such standards within the colony was seen as an aberration rather than a constitutive feature of colonial rule; and the belief that such universals were applicable in the colony at all stemmed from the pervasive framework of the liberal paradigm within which most colonial discourse was articulated. In the colonial world, the outside of liberal discourse was not an easy place to find. The application of Marxist explanations to deep-seated ways of thinking cannot guarantee in advance their overcoming. However, when materialist methodology begins to work away at the liberal inheritance, it becomes possible to see the ways in which both Marxism and liberalism remain misfits in the Indian context. This is not to deny the nomological claims of Marxian science nor the universalist aspirations of liberal humanism in the Indian situation, but rather to point toward the sites of their mutual interrelation and potential interruption, for it is in the specifics rather than the generalities that any theory meets its criteria of relevance for effecting change. The first Marxist statements on the cultural heritage in colonial India picked up where their liberal and radical predecessors had left off, significantly transforming the practice of cultural critique while continuing to be troubled by the specific nature of cultural production. This is not terribly surprising, since the genealogy of socialist thought in India is traditionally considered to originate in Bankimchandra's Samya ("Equality") and is elaborated on in the economic writings of R. C. Dutt, with practical lessons derived from the under-

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ground organization and violent tactics of the Extremists.6 Where earlier historians' accounts of the modern culture had avoided analyzing the concrete, social manifestations of colonial rule, the great advance of Marxist critics was to propose a more total description of the historical field, combining cultural explanations with economic and sociopolitical ones. This effort made possible the vision of an unevenly developed ensemble of relations in which the apparent victories of modern Indian culture could be examined in relation to the persistent backwardness of most of its socioeconomic conditions. The most suggestive strains of Marxist cultural historiography thus produced an enabling critique that would allow another kind of anticolonial politics, limited neither to the parliamentary agitation of the Congress nor to the bomb-throwing of the Extremists. By the first decades of the twentieth century, the time of Aurobindo, De, and Sen, India and especially Bengal were witnessing extreme manifestations of discontent with British rule. The colonial cultural legacy in Bengal, however, had not yet come under serious attack. Even in the radical nationalist challenges of Aurobindo, as we have seen, the triumph of literature was used to prove cultural equality rather than to criticize the government's lopsided approach to social reform. Although by 1910 nationalist leaders had succeeded in organizing among the masses some resistance to exploitive British practices, a réévaluation of the "cultural legacy" that would lead to formation of a counter-ideology was yet to emerge. In a contemporary reassessment of early anti-colonial practices, Bipan Chandra, for one, attributes the period's uneven development of anti-imperialist attitudes to the effectiveness of a paternalistic ideological program: "The secret of British power in India lay not only in physical force but also in moral force . . . the first lesson in primary school language textbooks was most often on 'the benefits of British rule.' The nationalist economic agitation gradually undermined these moral foundations."7 This ideological program seemed to operate even more effectively in the realm of high culture and among the upper strata of bhadralok elites. The case of R. C. Dutt is paradigmatic for the disarticulation of culture from other levels of analysis and protest, and for the lag between them: the reprinted Cultural Heritage that

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glorified progress under the English influence appeared in 1896, only seven years before Dutt's indictment of "drain" policies in his Economic History of India in the Victorian Age? The "economic agitation gradually undermined these moral foundations"—but the combined moral-aesthetic sanctum of high art remained essentially untouched until Marxist historians of the 1920s and 1930s began to weave these two strands back together. The immense contribution of Marxist thinking on the cultural legacy of colonialism lay in its calibration of the distinct levels of the social whole. What was the value of cultural progress within wholesale social regress? What was the relationship between economic dependency and cultural achievement? For the first time in nearly fifty years of systematic thinking about culture, the value of European acculturation began to be seriously considered systematically, as an ensemble of problems not limited to the single value of aesthetic innovation or cultural greatness. According to the prevalent tendencies of colonialist thought, the notion of a Bengal renaissance had gained currency as part of the ideological gift of a benign and generous colonial stewardship. Much as in sixteenth-century Europe, it was suggested, a new learning had swept over eastern India in the wake of European entry, casting the bright light of civilization over a previously dark continent. While both liberal and radical nationalist historians did much to dispel this myth of a dark age preceding the incursion of British capitalism, they still tended to glorify the achievements of the nineteenth century, implicitly validating the notion that Bengali culture had progressed under English rule. It remained the job of Marxist historians to reevaluate the colonial cultural legacy in terms of overall socioeconomic gains, and to prepare the cultural agenda for a political movement that would take the country not only beyond cultural parity, but beyond the larger-scale problematic of imperialism. In 1934, the Congress Socialist Party was formed as an interest group within the Indian National Congress. Nehru at this time was declaring his left radicalism from prison, but never joined the movement. It eventually served mostly as a cover operation for the Communist Party of India, banned after the Meerut conspiracy case in 1933 and not legalized until 1942. On the cultural front, the first

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All-India conference of the Progressive Writer's Association (PWA) was held in Lucknow in 1936, with Prem Chand as its president. Although not directly aligned with the Party, the PWA used slogans and internationalist terminology that showed a strong sympathy for left politics. Among the first participants, however, were artists who rejected communism while sympathizing with the various international antifascist movements that sprang up in the decade before World War II. The published proceedings of this conference9 betray a mixture of vague abstraction and dogmatic Zhdanovism, oscillating between romantic authorial ideologies and rather more programmatic, Soviet-inspired formulas for socialist realism. The PWA pledged in its first manifesto "to rescue literature and the other arts from the conservative classes in whose hands they have been degenerating so long, to bring arts into the closest touch with the people" (MCMI, I, 75). An overriding emphasis on populism is evident throughout the proceedings in recognition of the debilitating divorce between high and low culture in a predominantly illiterate society. In practice, the commitment of the PWA to discovering and collecting "people's art" from the countryside was strongly affirmed and diligently carried out. Cultural workers were sent to rural districts in order to feel the influence of folk art, in hopes that the workers in turn would persuade urban artists to create universal or classless productions. The openly communist Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), formed in 1943, produced a tremendously successful drama along these lines, Bijan Bhattacharya's Nabanna ("New Harvest"), in 1944. It might be suggested that, by the end of World War II, and largely through IPTA's prominent activity in relief work during the man-made famine of 1943, the most dynamic and visible forms of cultural production in Calcutta were predominantly left-leaning. The upsurge in Marxist cultural activities gave rise to only a limited réévaluation of the themes and methods of literary historiography, however, which still took as its primary goal the deification of nineteenth-century middle-class culture. Dinabandhu Mitra's protest play Nildarpan, which in i860 had exposed the harsh conditions in the British-run indigo plantations, became the centerpiece of a historical argument that found in the renaissance traces of an

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oppositional culture that proved indigenous genius could prevail and flourish under colonial domination. Occasional sites of contest to the English legacy emerge from the documents of the early PWA and IPTA; for example, the suggestion that "This poetry of Tagore . . . is morbidly escapist, born of a desire to forget the reality, and despite all its beauty is just a dreamer's dream. . . . It only drags us down to inaction, and is in the highest degree reactionary" (Ahmad Ali, "Towards Progressive Culture," MCAil, I, 63). There are later references to what might have been points of departure for a radical revision of the imperial past, as in this pregnant phrase buried within a rather traditional essay: "Michael's MeghnaAa Badha registers the rise and premature fall of the humanistic ideal of bourgeois democracy under colonial conditions in British-owned India" (Sitangshu Maitra, "Michael Madhusudan," MCAil, III, 312). Even Bankimchandra, darling of the early nationalists, began to emerge as a troubled figure around 1940, as the nationalist movement neared its sixtieth year: "Consistently moving away from the popular and the radical towards social conservatism and the friendly power of the British, Bankimchandra could not but create characters in his own image . . . his bourgeois-conservative consciousness weakened instead of being developed on the anvil of ideological conflict, Bankimchandra ended up in the reactionary camp . . ." (S. Banerjee, "The Bankimchandra Controversy," MCAil, III, 318-19). The poet Bishnu Dey, eulogizing what he called "the popular mind," takes up what D. C. Sen had earlier described as the loss of the "representative character" of the language by the mid-nineteenth century: "This quality of mind . . . one finds . . . in all the notable works in our language until we come to our Western period.... With Iswar Chandra [Gupta] we come to our last reputable popular poet. And what little strength of the popular idiom, the racy turns and twists of words and phrases, emphatic signs of the genius of the language, we find in Madhusudan's plays, we find neither in Bankim nor in Tagore" (Dey, "Notes on Progressive Writing in Bengal," MCMI, 1, 223). Such disputes often boiled down to a seemingly unresolvable conflict between Westernization and traditionalism. The drive toward progressive culture, which emphasized rationalism, modernization, and socialism even while trying to capture the essence of

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the "popular," encountered a historical contradiction when it turned to reexamine the past. After all, the great modernizers of the nineteenth century had made the same choice, but with disastrous results. Sudhindranath Datta had pointed this out as early as 1938: "but for the dragon's teeth [Rammohun Roy] so unwittingly sowed, this land need not have produced such flowers of evil as ourselves. . . . That source of perennial energy [i.e., populism] has choked up again . . . with weeds of foreign extraction—the Bengali middle class" (Datta, "Whiggism, Radicalism, and Treason in Bengal," MCMI, I, 87). The cultural strategy of these early Marxists, who were almost exclusively educated in the English system and from middle-class backgrounds, resulted if not in intellectual incoherence then in an unavoidable bad faith. Stressing for the most part the need to go deeper among the people, they continued to write, speak, criticize, and proselytize to the Bengali middle class. It is important to note that the ideological charges brought against the great renaissance figures such as Bankimchandra and Tagore (religiosity, regional chauvinism, romantic spiritualism, class-interestedness) could just as well be applied to most of their critics.

II Susobhan Sarkar's highly influential "Notes on the Bengal Renaissance" (published in 1946 under the pseudonym Amit Sen as a pamphlet designed for "political workers on the left") reassesses the legacy of the nineteenth century in order to formulate principles for future progress. As we will see, it is essentially a false start. A later note to the reprinted edition stresses that the pamphlet "does not pretend to be a Marxist analysis."10 There is little to gain by situating it as a canonical statement of communist cultural policy, since that policy changed dramatically and repeatedly during World War II. Nonetheless, as a statement from the left in this particular crisis, "Notes" documents the persistence of English aesthetic ideology within the bounds of radical critique. In so doing, it exhibits an odd but telling combination of liberal aesthetic with radical political

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tendencies, a combination significant for its demonstration of the resiliency of the cultural heritage. Before presenting my reading of the text, it is appropriate to balance the account somewhat. First, a personal perspective: P. C. Joshi, then party secretary of the CPI, claimed to have coerced Sarkar into writing the pamphlet: "I pressed that he write a book or pamphlet on the origins of Bengali renaissance. We overcame his hesitation by making the proposal a demand from the politburo, put all his exstudents working at the party centre and outside to press him. The result was his famous Notes on the Bengal Renaissance."11 Second, situational information: since the founding of the CPI as an international revolutionary party, its twists and turns of ideology and practice have been confusing. The so-called "undivided" CPI initially pursued an anti-Gandhian, anti-imperialist strategy, with cadres of jailed Extremists, students, and middle-class intellectuals. After the U S S R was dragged into World War II, it sided with the British to combat the fascist threat under the banner of "people's war." Even before the war, some communists, including M. N. Roy, became Congress supporters; others, again including Roy, later renounced communism altogether. In 1964 the Party split into Left (revolutionary) and Right (parliamentary) factions, and in 1969 the Left faction split again. So, without providing a detailed analysis of the situation on the ground, it is difficult to determine which card Susobhan Sarkar was playing at the time. Third, and finally, there was Sarkar's reputation. Through his teaching, research, and personal example, he left a formidable mark on Bengali culture. The intellectual scene was forever changed. Among his lasting contributions to intellectual life, according to Barun De, was imparting to his students an unrelenting commitment to Marxism and its organizational principles, combined with a "steadfast attachment to the liberal heritage... in Western Europe." 12 All the more reason to interrogate the egregious force of the cultural legacy in his text. The title "Notes on the Bengal Renaissance" sounds the high note of Bengali regionalism, and its opening sections rehearse the liberal assumption that parity in the cultural field can act as a tool

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to loosen the solid structure of the political. Bengal's cultural renaissance affords the Bengali people the same sort of cultural credibility as the outsiders who presently control the government. That cultural heritage is quickly vanishing, however: "And today when disintegration threatens every aspect of our life, it is more necessary than ever to recall our past heritage, to go over the struggles and achievements which had built up a proud tradition, now in danger of being forgotten" ("NBR," 13). This call to arms is peculiar for several reasons: its regionalism isolates Bengal from the leftist movement at the national level; in the thick of the drive toward Independence it finds "past heritage" equally or more significant than present struggle; and, most contradictory, it re-envisions as militant and mobilizing a past similar to the liberal one, which tolerated and even encouraged British dominion over every sphere of life. That Sarkar's arguments in the service of communism essentially recapitulate much of the liberal inheritance is symptomatic of a broader malaise within Marxist thought that has remained the task of future generations to rectify. It is, perhaps, still important to keep in mind the pro-Allied swing of the Party and the perceived political necessity to negotiate with the Congress. One thing the sides have in common is English education, and perhaps emphasizing the Bengali mastery of it will open a channel to dialogue. It is curious that Sarkar, writing at a time when the Communist Party was hoping to assemble a unified opposition to the Congress's dominance over the Independence proceedings, should take the opportunity to assert Bengali regional exceptionalism over the All-India, or indeed internationalist, claims of the Party.13 Yet this assertion becomes a structural foundation of his narrative when he divides the nearly one hundred years of the Indian freedom struggle into five successive sections of the cultural renaissance under colonialism, each capped by a milestone of Bengali history. Granted that his is a history of the Bengal renaissance, but this periodizing strategy makes his parallel narrative—the entire Indian freedom movement from Rammohun Roy to Gandhi—a homogenous line, punctuated by Bengali events and personalities. This tactic also makes the freedom struggle precisely coeval with the British cultural incursion, which causes one to wonder what sort of freedom was being sought,

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and from whom. It links, too—and in a wholly positive way—the early phases of Westernization with the emergence of Gandhi as a mass leader, neither recognizing that Westernization had as much inhibited as enabled the Bengali bourgeoisie in their struggle for selfdetermination, nor displaying the slightest respect for Gandhi's embrace, by this time, of a profound antimodernism.14 Stranger still is the glorification of nineteenth-century cultural heroes, in almost every case zemindars, banians, or government officials, by a popular leader of the vanguard party. Why retell this wellknown story? What can be the radical value of this by-now canonical history? Sarkar makes repeated efforts to popularize the great reformers, often against the evidence, in order to bring the predominantly upper-class, upper-caste, male, Hindu cultural revival into line with developing popular consciousness. Sarkar's picture of Rammohun Roy, for example, contains none of the measured ambiguity of Sen's account, nor the slightest recognition of the irony and cynicism vented by S. K. De, whose work was by this time well known and widely accepted.15 Rammohun is instead characterized by his "deep love of the people" ("NBR," 15) and his "care for the enlightenment of the general public" ("NBR," 19). Of the famous trip to England, De describes Roy's creeping senility, his failure to attend the meeting of the select committee for the renewal of the Company's charter, and his advocacy "of colonization in India by European landed aristocracy and European capitalists."16 Sarkar writes: "we find him protesting against the miserable condition of the peasants and the misrule of the landlords, and demanding a fixed rent roll, a permanent settlement for the actual cultivators and a peasant militia" ("NBR," 21). There is no mention of actual success on these issues, nor of Roy's financial interests, polygamy, or casteism. He is even excused for being "cautious in his general bearing": negative publicity over "vexatious law suits" were occupying "much of his time" ("NBR," 24)—a rather weak apology for a man who sued his own mother to acquire family land. The deification of renaissance giants continues for most of the pamphlet's fifty-odd pages, hastily listing the great men and great deeds in chronological order: Rammohun, Hare, Dwarkanath, Radhakanta, Derozio, and so on. The account seems generally di-

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rected toward rewriting the renaissance as a populist movement. Curiously, however, in terms of the account's wholesale embrace of the "awakening" produced by the impact of British rule, the most popular-minded figures are not always the most Westernized or rational. The Derozians' "concept of the people and their rights . . . did not take much concrete shape in their mind" ("NBR," 27). By and large, the first forty pages of "Notes" reads like a society handbill, with about as much political and critical incisiveness. Larger claims to be advancing a theory of political causality as if it were afact allow us to proceed with an analysis rather than a heavyhanded démystification of a naive and cavalier summary. Far from a more or less innocent cultural history, "Notes" in essence attempts a highly ambitious elevation of the bhadralok intellectual to the ranks of world-historical actor, single-handedly leading India to the doorstep of Independence. This thesis is not advanced overtly but smuggled in through an ingenious narrative "ruse" or sleight of hand. All stories are ideological, and Sarkar reminds us that there is no neutral or objective mode of presenting information, no value-free presentation of even the most seemingly objective facts. It is precisely the objective mode of narrative here that gives his hand away, as the concluding section of his narrative switches in tone and in tempo, from reverent simplicity to tense agitation. The last section is almost entirely devoted to the 1905-11 period —Partition, Swadeshi, and the Extremist agitation. We have mentioned its tonal shift. The narrative style in this section, too, is transformed from a static series of snapshots to a running commentary on daily activities, often citing the time of day or exact figures for sizes of crowds, amounts of funds raised, and numbers of persons tried in court or deported. This model of quotidian history is a dramatic departure from Sarkar's earlier tableau style, which often covered twenty years at a bound or the life of a famous figure in one sentence. Here the last nine pages barely cover six years. The journalistic style might seem suitable for the content, which requires a certain specificity and detail and attempts to sweep the reader into the ecstatic rhythms of a popular uprising. On this score, "Notes" is surely successful as political pamphleteering. But one cannot help suspecting

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that there is a larger historical strategy at work here than that of mass mobilization. The dramatic structure of the essay leads one to think that theoretical assumption is being smuggled in under the illusion of a matter-of-fact reportage that is too hurried, too important, to admit calculation. The theory holds that Bengali Extremism of the Swadeshi period, which claims as its historical parentage the illustrious pageant of the Bengal renaissance, is direcdy responsible for the installation of the radical element in the Congress and the subsequent success of Gandhi. Closing Sarkar's breathless account of "Partition of Bengal and Swadeshi" we find this historical sequence: In the Calcutta Congress of December 1917, a split with moderates was narrowly averted, but Bengal nationalism rallied decisively around the extremist banner. . . . A t the Special Congress in Bombay, August 1918, the long impending final breach took place. . . . The Congress was now entirely in the hands of the extremists. . . . The Rowlatt Act . . . developed into the new crisis of 1919. That was the year when M . K. Gandhi stepped forward and assumed the leadership of the national movement. ( " N B R , " 66)

In R. C. Dutt's Cultural Heritage, it is by the indigenization of Jayadeva and Vidyapati that Westerners became native sons of the Bengal soil, or were at least absorbed into it. Sarkar nativizes the English-educated Hindu elite by claiming that all of their imported ideologies have effectively been synthesized and transformed into uniquely Bengali attributes of popular extremism. Similarly, contributions to the freedom struggle from other areas of India are Bengalized and elitized, making the Calcutta intelligentsia the motivating force behind nationwide anti-imperialism. Sarkar's account effectively ignores the internal development of the Congress itself, especially the interventions of the non-Bengalis Tilak, Gokhale, and Lala Lajpat Rai. It gives remarkably short shrift to the Khilafat movement. It slights the cult of personality that grew around Gandhi after his return to India and his elevation into a charismatic leader. It damningly ignores the importance of the support from below for the effectiveness of the mass movement (this will become a preoccupation of historiography in the 1970s). It entirely ignores the extremist challenges to moderate reform in the very active regions of Andhra,

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Punjab, and Maharashtra. It is, finally, this suppression of historical fact that turns "Notes" into a militant or mobilizing history, into true propaganda. History is not only able to include, to search out, to narrativize, to "cover"; it is equally capable of discounting, ignoring, leaving out, refusing to cover. Bankimchandra had lamented "Bengal has no history! Proud nations have an abundance of historical writing; we have none." 17 Sarkar seems to think Bengal has too much, and will therefore thin the record. "Proudly" he writes up the freedom movement as an unalloyed Bengali project, and the nineteenth century as the historic coming-to-consciousness of the first Englisheducated elites. Later Marxist historians will castigate his blindness to history as a willful forgetting of the Bengali intelligentsia's historic role as the nation's first and largest comprador group. Other significant contradictions mark "Notes" as an apologia for elite power-politics, as opposed to the self-styled Marxist-populist account it has long been taken for. "Bengal was a good soil for the genesis of extremism. Internal consolidation rather than mere demonstration, self-help rather than petitions, going deeper amongst the people rather than following the routine of the beaten track— such was the mentality of extremism" ("NBR," 54). It is significant enough that Sarkar contradicts each of these premises somewhere in his essay ("consolidation," pp. 24-25; "petitions," p. 54; "amongst the people," pp. 23, 27, 30, 60, 61); but he saves his most revealing slippage for the widening chasm between the theory and practice of extremism. Extremism meant "going deeper amongst the people," yet in the hectic reporting of the great uprising against Partition, he is gratified to find "Famous landlords, big businessmen, leading professional people [going] with the popular tide, though significantly enough we find no special effort to organize and arouse workers and peasants" ("NBR," 60). Extremism is the culmination of one hundred years of Bengali "consolidation," "self-help," and "going deeper amongst the people," yet in its finest hour it is manifestly a movement of landlords, businessmen, and professionals. That Sarkar does not acknowledge the (at best) qualified success of this movement— which ought to be apparent to him as he writes on the eve of Bengal's

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second Partition—reveals his failure to recognize the essentially elitist quality of the cultural "renaissance," to produce an analysis that would point the way toward widening the base of Party activities, or to attempt to reconcile the rapidly growing Hindu-Muslim discontent with a less exclusionary history. Thus read against the grain, "Notes" shows itself to be aligned with what the CPI might then have called the reformist policies of the Congress agitation, which, under threat of a growing popular insurgency, increasingly sided with commercial interests to forestall the possibility of revolution. According to Sumit Sarkar, this fatal compromise between business and Congress achieved a " 'peaceful' transfer of power at the cost of partition and a communal holocaust."18 The CPI bitterly attacked such policy in its official pronouncements, but apparently could not entirely disprove it in its writing of literary history. Claiming Gandhi as the heir of Bengali cultural progress appears, in 1946, as another kind of revisionism, an attempt to confuse the political sides and ride the coattails of the Mahatma's popularity into the Independence proceedings.19 Sarkar's homogenizing tendencies exclude the roles of the lower social orders, popular culture, and women in both the Bengal renaissance and the political movement following it. The sections of his essay devoted to "Muslim consciousness" generally depict the Muslim community as cloistered, communalist, opportunistic, vicious, or dumb during the crisis of 1907-8. "The Muslim masses were largely neutral during the [extremist] struggle as befitted their lack of political consciousness," but the growth of Muslim intransigence after 1911 seems to "represent the penetration of political consciousness deeper down in the Muslim people" ("NBR," 66). "Muslim leadership was pleased with the Partition which held out hopes of preferment in the new province . . . " (NBR, 64). Rather than providing an analysis that would reveal such double-dealing as a continuation of the British policy of divide and rule, or at least note the extremely unequal terms by which Muslims and Hindus were educated and promoted within the colonial hierarchy, Sarkar tends, however subtly, to reify the Muslim historic compromise into an essentialized communalist

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opportunism, modified only occasionally by the trickle-down effect of elite leadership. Sarkar's later contributions to Marxist cultural history were of great importance to the generation of intellectuals that gained prominence in the 1970s. But "Notes on the Bengal Renaissance" is an indication of the practical political contradictions generated by the imposition of inherited categories on the unique complex of forces that shaped Indian cultural development under colonialism. Barely six years after writing "Notes," Sarkar would recant many of his earlier positions, citing "drawbacks in the achievement of our middle classes in the British days. . . . Our renaissance was hindered at every step... " 2 0 His 1967 essay, "Conflict within the Bengal Renaissance," however, much discussed by later Marxist historians for perpetuating an "unqualified equation of 'the westernizers' . . . with modernism or progress," 21 still supports the underlying premise of "Notes" that the progressive influence of colonialism has been basically beneficial. Yet the essay does so in a manner that recognizes the specificity of historical trends, indicating a far more fluid and contingent vision of the process of history. Progress or Westernization is never an unqualified good: "A historical appreciation of the 'new life' in Bengal is possible, even after recognizing its obvious weaknesses; it did move on the axis of the upper stratum alone of society, the ibhadmhks,\ it could not draw in the Muslim community and the masses of backward Hindus; it failed to strike a consistent anti-imperialist note." 22 Progress is instead described as a general movement beyond the contradiction between tradition and modernity, a true synthesis . . . the fusion of two opposite trends into a third higher entity which supercedes the earlier stages of development. Where is that higher third in our renaissance, and why was synthesis so often necessary? What real synthesis is possible between abstract ideals like the fight for social reform and defence of traditional custom, secular human rights and Hindu superiority, reason and faith? One could but choose, in specific issue after issue, if not always for one's whole life. ("CBR," 74)

If it was not possible to find a comprehensive "synthesis," as Sarkar now agrees the nineteenth-century reformers did not, it is still

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possible to make a value judgment: "Here the criterion must be the greater appropriateness and relevance to future progress" ("CBR," 75). In light of this criterion, "Westernism was the more progressive trend in 19th century Bengal" ("CBR," 75). This conclusion brings us back to "Notes," in which political Extremism was valorized as the progressive trend in the nineteenth-century renaissance that led directly to the triumph of the Independence movement. In the later essay Sarkar reevaluates that connection: "The inherent weakness of Traditionalism, from this point of view, can be detected in embryo even in our Political Extremism. This contributed to an immediate popularity, but the price had to be paid in the future. A legacy was left to hinder the building up of a new united India" ("CBR," 75). This reassessment suggests a double reading. It seems to imply that (1) the nineteenth-century legacy stretching from Young Bengal to Independence was basically a progressive, rationalist movement that was severely hampered by internal social determinants (not only the forces of "traditionalism" but the structure of colonial power itself) that it could never overcome and which eventually "hinder[ed] the building up of a new unified India"; and (2) the Westernism of the nineteenth century did incorporate traditional India into a wholeheartedly progressive synthesis, but this movement was derailed by the political strategy of Extremism in the early twentieth century, and its subsequent transformation into radical nationalism (led by the traditionalist Gandhi) impeded the full realization of progressive values. There is a difference. It is important to keep these two strands of the argument separate, for the first implies that the "progressivism" of the nineteenth century was essentially an impossible project from the start, operating as it did within the confines of a colonialist apparatus of power that actually preserved semifeudal relations of production within a proto-capitalist structure and never would have allowed a full modernization to mature. This strand will go on to inform the first fully systematic study of the nineteenth-century Bengali cultural movement that draws on the colonial context in an integrated way, Ashok Sen's Vidyasagar and His Elusive Milestones. The second strand of the argument implies quite a different evaluation of the cultural legacy: that it was truly "progressive," that

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it had far-reaching but attainable goals, and that the political strategy of Extremism was no more than a misguided tactic within an overall cultural revolution that temporarily set back the gains of the earlier period, which by implication can be recovered through an incremental project of selection and adjustment. The difference here boils down to two irreconcilable positions on the value of the past to determine present and future action. The first, that colonialism and its particular relation of forces determined the course that the Westernizing movement was allowed to take, is compatible with the cultural materialism of the seventies generation. The second, that Western "progress" was an absolute good, and that with minor tinkering it could be induced to continue, succumbs to the ruse of progress we have been calling colonial liberalism. It is a testament to English ideology's power to determine the course of historical narration that the liberal position with its ideology of progress—so dear to utilitarians bent on improvement, or to liberal nationalists convinced of the beneficence of their masters—could be reinscribed almost intact by a self-styled leftist historiography. Ill Almost contemporary with "Notes on the Bengal Renaissance," J. C. Ghosh's History of Bengali Literature (1948)23 provides a strong antidote to the ideological valorization of progress from a materialist but decidedly non-Marxist position. While there can be little doubt that Ghosh wholeheartedly endorses the modernizing legacy of British influence, his account makes the importation and assimilation of that influence far more complex and ambiguous. Here too, modernization is considered an unalloyed good, but one not available to everyone; it is a peculiar irony of history that, although the Bengalis were well exposed to English learning and capital, they did not acquire more of it. Ghosh's study must then account for the Bengali's contemporary cultural inferiority despite his long association with Europeans, an inferiority traceable to his innate "traditionalism," the inability to embrace a greater quantity of Western influence. This inability is located only partially within the character of Western in-

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fluence; it mostly resides in the "archaic," "semi-religious" nature of Bengali tradition—feudal attributes that tenaciously persisted despite the opportunities offered by the West through two hundred years of close association. A built-in anthropology colors every element of Ghosh's "history," implying an absolute cultural difference between the observer and the object of study that is reminiscent of a Malinowskian ethnography: "The Bengali people appear, from their physical and linguistic traits, to be a mixture of the four races known to ethnologists as Kol, Dravidian, Mongolian, and Aryan" (BL, i). Viewed as if in a museum diorama, Bengalis appear in Ghosh's text as strange natives to which we (Westerners) need a comprehensive introduction. Thus the "Literature" of this book's title is one of a complex of ethnographic factors to be explained, along with heredity, language, kinship, political history, ancient migrations, the sea trade, official and folk religions, and most importantly, bourgeoisification. A veritable archive of oriental knowledge is thus established. If Sarkar made the Bengali the Other of India, with preternatural learning and a disposition for violence, Ghosh, the good Oxfordian, now makes the Bengali the Other of the world. Ghosh provides ample evidence for this innate cultural backwardness, and the central (though unstated) question of this study could be phrased, "If they have been ours for two hundred years, why aren't they more like us?" Ghosh never provides the detailed analysis of native inferiority that might satisfy the discriminating Orientalist, but he does begin the reconstruction of prevailing "conditions" (his word) that lay the groundwork for a materialist explanation of the stunted cultural development of the modern period—as Eurocentric as that is in this case. In terms of methodology, Ghosh is certainly among the most mechanistic historians we have considered so far, as he makes a decisive link between the prevailing material conditions in the country and the formation of class-consciousness—a rather vulgar interpretation of Marx's famous statement, "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."24 This linking of social being and consciousness as the "causal law" dictating the

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forms of culture clearly situates Bengali Literature within the mechanistic mode of argumentation. However, the narrative, ideological, and tropological combinations of Ghosh's history also clearly distance him from what White would consider the exemplary achievement of Marx, who "inappropriately" tailored his mechanistic argument to the service of a redemptive or comic emplotment, implying a revolutionary or radical political ideology. In Marx's metonymic narration of history, the causal laws of human society required a radical break with capitalism in order to transcend the fundamental antagonisms of that mode of production and to attain the redemptive freedom of socialism that would "bring . . . the prehistory of human society to a close." This edenic, integrative vision of reconciliation at the end of prehistory is surely one of the essential features of Marx's thought, and without it the force of his vision and emplotment of history would be incoherent, however indelicate it might seem to the felicitous combination of narratological affinities. In Ghosh, however, the causal laws of capitalism that dictate the social and cultural consciousness of the Bengali are ironically interrupted by the essentialized racial characteristics of Bengalis as a whole, expressed as the force of "tradition," which keeps them backward and disallows their developing the necessary cultural and intellectual capacities to begin great social transformation. To be sure, the transformation Ghosh would have desired was not the leap into socialism, but rather the cultural leap into modernity. Capitalism, he asserts, was unable to "come to a head" in India, as would have been the necessary precondition for its modernization and the condition sufficient for the achievement of a true univeralism. The reason for capitalism's failure in India is explained not materially but culturally, its implicit fault resting within the stultifying "tradition" of Indian society. The cultural repercussions of this failure have resulted in the permanent deformation of creativity in Bengal, which has produced "one of the second-class literatures of the world" (BL, 25). Ghosh's narrative of the "growth" of modern Bengali literature sometimes seems like an elaborate excuse for its stagnation. Bengali literature here often seems an ironic exception to the universalist

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tendency of capital to improve man's consciousness through the development of the forces of production. It should have become better under English rule, but an innate, anthropological backwardness (tradition) checked its potential for development. When emploting the historical field, Ghosh thus juxtaposes two structures that periodically cross, resulting in the interruption of the linear continuity of both. Capitalism and traditionalism run on parallel lines, occasionally throwing off sparks but never merging their strengths. Ghosh seems to want history to move in one way or the other, but he is unable to find the logic that could describe the uneasy tension in between. He remains incredulous toward earlier valorizations of the achievements of Bengali culture and therefore highly disdainful of the great writers of the nineteenth century. Long catalogues of negative attributes are affixed to Michael, Bankim, and Rabindranath; with a self-conscious wink Ghosh seems to be testing just how much he can get away with in debunking the renaissance myth. This ironic relativization of the historical field often seems designed to separate the author from his field of study. It certainly leaves no room for a political program. Ghosh's sly materialism exhibits a fascinatingly misshapen form of materialist argument by which attention to conditions and relations of production and their laws for the transformation of consciousness serves the ironic ends of a conservative ideology: Bengali culture had the opportunity to develop along the modernizing lines of the European bourgeoisie, but botched that chance because of its unconquerable backwardness. So much the better for the true, aristocratic character of Europe! We are shown how progressive and traditional elements combine to the detriment of each in the colonial cultural paradigm, and the perpetual underdevelopment of colonial culture vis-a-vis Europe: The same political and economic forces that introduced the urban note into literature also gave it a middle-class character. The rise of the middle class to power and influence in India is a recent thing, and synchronizes with the establishment of British rule. If British imperialism spelt the ruin of the old feudal aristocracy and peasantry in Bengal, it conferred prosperity on the new commercial, professional, and landed interests it called into being. In Bengal, as in other parts of the world, the new-risen middle class called itself

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the gentry (bhadra-lok), and it was the most virile, progressive, and modernspirited section of the society. So dominant has it been in political, economic, and cultural spheres that Indo-British civilization to the present day would be most aptly labelled middle-class civilization. As a class it was most eager to receive English education, and to import Western arts and science into India; the Western influence on Indian life chiefly operated through this medium. It took the initiative in the great religious and social movements such as the Brahma Samaj, and it was the main force behind the nationalist movement which afterwards crystallized as the National Congress. By far the majority of writers since 1800 have belonged to this class, with the result that the literature of this period has a distinct middle-class consciousness. Almost all the important writers were interested in social and political questions, and they were liberal humanitarians, radicals, and reformers whose principles

were a diluted version of the principles prevailing in contemporary England. They were large hearted and enthusiastic idealists, sentimental, didactic, and classcomplacent. (BL, 99, my emphasis)

The economy developed, but somehow the mind lagged behind —or rather the highest reaches of the mind. These "great religious and social movements such as the Brahma Samaj a n d . . . the National Congress"—the Protestantism and nationalism that, by a homogenizing logic specific to western Europe, are here seen to go hand-inhand with the introduction of imperial capital—brought bourgeois hegemony without cultural greatness. Ghosh's fervent admiration for British capitalism sees in India economic prosperity coupled with a diluted artistic sense specific to the middle class; his implicit standard of cultural greatness is that of the European aristocracy, undiluted by bourgeois aspiration. However, it does not occur to him that perhaps English imperialism did not create an unambiguous economic miracle, nor that in Bengal the seemingly diluted form of cultural production might have had specific attributes that made it something else entirely. Can dilution itself be a cultural value? The idea is provocative, suggesting a kind of hybridization or protective coloration that may have been consciously adopted by the Bengali bctbu, a figure widely ridiculed in the literature of the period, who adopted Western manners of dress and drinking in public but at home still wore his dhoti and ate his macherjhol. For Ghosh, only elite culture is culture, while its bourgeois epigones are merely bounders after fame.

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Colonial bourgeois culture is second-order stuff, barely worth consideration, a "second-class literature." So why did he bother? Ghosh's estimation of the strength of the bourgeoisie ("virile, progressive, and modern-spirited") is unambiguous, but the culture it produces is nonetheless to him a degraded, decadent thing. With the rise of this class, according to Ghosh, came its institutions of taste and the bourgeois vocation of the professional man of letters. Perhaps the most enlightening feature of Ghosh's study is its attention to the mediation of the spirit of early Indian capitalism through cultural institutions and to the new types of subjects they make possible. Ghosh's work thereby escapes, in part, the idealism of its nationalist and even Marxist predecessors. A possible, consumption-oriented solution to the mysterious decadence of Bengali literature thus becomes available: Literature now became a commodity to be bought and sold, and its commercialization only too often led to its vulgarization. . . . The economic freedom it gained no doubt brought many compensations, but for the average writer in a competitive capitalist society that freedom was more often than not an illusion which could only become a reality if the writer sacrificed his artistic conscience to his reader's taste. ( B L , 100)

The institutions of Fort William College, the Serampore Missionary Press, the Calcutta School Book Society, and the Hindu College opened the doors to Western-style prose writing, history, and journalism. How then does one explain the diluted character of Bengali literature, its "sentimental, unrealistic, and semi-religious" (BL, 161) quality, its status as "occup[ying] a high place among the second-class literatures of the world" (BL, 25, my emphasis)? What makes English and European literature somehow inherently better, and how—coming from advanced capitalist nations, those high altars of commodification—did they escape the fate of bourgeois dilution to which Bengali fell prey? Ghosh must do some historical sidestepping to tie his critique of literary value to class origins: of the major writers he discusses in any detail, there is not among them a "professional man of letters" (the career of the first truly self-sufficient modern writer in Bengali, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, falls out-

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side the scope of his study). While a literary market can be said to arise in the early nineteenth century, with attendant periodicals, bookstalls, and public performances, there is not a major Bengali author who writes for it exclusively. Figures whom Ghosh cites as exemplars of market bad taste—Rammohun, Vidyasagar, Pearychand, Kaliprasanna, Dinabandhu, Bankimchandra—were either employed in the bureaucratic machinery of the Empire or lived off income from zamindari interests or trading with the Company (the sole exception is Iswarchandra Gupta, who here plays the role of an antiquarian, and is not seriously considered Westernized). Michael Madhusudan Datta, the first "modern" author of Bengal, comes closest to being a professional writer, though as such he labored in dire poverty and eventually practiced law to survive. He is probably best described as "self-unmade." That he is undisputedly the towering figure of the new literature largely vitiates Ghosh's claim that commodification has made the culture "effeminate" and "sentimental." The judgments of taste incorporated into Ghosh's history most fully reveal his predilections as a historian. The only detailed analyses of literary works are devoted, appropriately enough, to Michael, Bankimchandra, and Rabindranath. It is clear that he does not personally like any of them, though for very different reasons. His final assessment of Bengali literature is that it is on the whole a rather dull affair that suffers from its inability to become more European: The best things in it were of European origin, but we should also note that, except in the work of a small number of intellectuals, the best elements of European literature cannot be said to have arrived in Bengal, or, having arrived, to have struck roots. This is as true of the present day as of the nineteenth century. . . . We have had no Bengali writer who has sought from Europe the intellectuality and scientific realism which our literature most needed, and which are among the best things Europe could give. On the contrary many of our writers have sought in the West new refuges for the sentimentalism, escapism, and mysticism which have been the bane of our literature in the past. (BL, 166)

It is jarring when Ghosh writes "we" and "us." His tone throughout is so dismissive, so derisory, that one would never expect him to want to be associated with such stuff. Ghosh continues, "The main

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things which Rabindranath Tagore . . . imported from the West are the sentimental languors of the Celtic Twilight, the affectations of thefin-de-siecleaestheticism, and misty vagueness of Maeterlinckian symbolism" (BL, 166). It is rather harder to imagine this aestheticism pertaining to the heroic epics of Michael or the militaristic romances of Bankimchandra. Michael is too modern, Bankimchandra too traditional. "Nothing could show better the tragic side of Western influence than that an Indian engaged in an epic should lay aside Valmiki and should wish to write like a Greek" (BL, 144). Though it is not surprising that one would wish to try. Michael's agonist in Meghnadbadh is not merely Homer but all that is great and true in Western learning, all that legitimizes imperialism in the eyes of the imperialist. That the Greeks held slaves but could still be considered the founders of European civilization was surely a notion that needed interrogating. Yet for Ghosh, the great sin of the Bengali epic is not hubris but lack of tradition. "Some of its most serious flaws were gratuitously introduced by Madhusudan through his willful disrespect for Indian culture. . . . Meghnad is the hero, and to elevate him and Ravan Madhusudan has wantonly degraded Ram and Laksman . . . [who] are two of the noblest figures in Indian mythology, but in Madhusudan's poem they are utterly devoid of valour and honour. . . . We wonder if we are reading a heroic or a mock-heroic poem" (.BL, 145). Michael imported the heroic form, blank verse, and the sonnet, greatly developed Bengali theater, and made the European poetic tradition as important to Bengali as the Sanskritic. Yet, "He was an alien star, a brief and brilliant wanderer into our firmament" (BL, 147). What would it have taken to harmonize these two traditions, as Ghosh seems to imply should have happened, and what writer has done it? Certainly not Bankimchandra, "the father of the Indian novel rather than a good novelist" (BL, 154), who on the other hand is too traditional. "No one, not even Rabindranath Tagore, has come so close to the heart of the Bengali people" (BL, 153). Although Bankim was the innovator of the novel form in the modern European style and was "one of the greatest representatives of his age" of the new

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English-educated middle class, he had no sense of history, politics, or social reform and remained "sentimental, unrealistic, and semireligious" to the end. The realism of his characters is sacrificed to "propaganda . . . for the conventional moral, the ready-made value, which Bankim unquestioningly accepts and enthusiastically upholds. . . . He is a champion of the institution of marriage, and... extols the conjugal virtues" (BL, 157). His historical sense is "unintelligent and unimaginative. . . . Nowhere . . . does he show the least awareness that there is such a thing as the spirit of history, let alone make any effort to capture it. . . . The living breath of history escapes him . . ." (BL, 155-56). His political novels "show no understanding of political issues, and their patriotism, though genuine, is of the romantic, sentimental, and wishful sort that evaporates in high-sounding talk and theatrical action" (BL, 160). We must ask where else might be found the positive values in Bengali culture that Bankim could be measured against. Ghosh does not find them. Bankim's greatness lies in the simple fact that he single-handedly created for Bengal the attitudes which are found to be so pale when measured against European standards. That these watered-down versions of Western thought might actually be the harmonious synthesis that Ghosh is seeking does not occur to him at all. He admits that "Bankim's limitations are the limitations of his age," but fails to notice that they are also the first positive steps of the Bengal renaissance outgrowing its dependence on British influence and fashioning its own distinctive character as a culture influenced by but distinct from European cultural standards. Ghosh finds the most egregious lapse of taste in Bankim's Sanskritism, which is no more than "fundamental indiscipline . . . cheapest rhetoric . . . absurd ostentations and affectations" (BL, 161). "He had it in him to write with the utmost simplicity and precision" but instead "violate [d] the elementary laws of probability and naturalness" (BL, 163) and over-relied on a "primitive" conception of Fate. In short, "Bankim is always the typical bourgeois, smug, sentimental, didactic and conservative, and the world he creates is as narrow as it is false" (BL, 157; emphasis in original). Oddly enough, in 1961

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Ghosh published his translation of Bankim's Krishnakanter's Will in the United States. Why? The chapter devoted to Tagore gives us a more positive sense of Ghosh's aesthetic preferences, which have up to now been defined only in negative terms. "Tagore is without a doubt the finest product of Western influence. The Western element in his work affords excellent evidence of the ideal of internationalism which he passionately held and worked for" (BL, 173). The critic's effort will be to "note the element of steel and concrete that went into his making, and thus to dispose of the legend . . . of Tagore the pale-lily poet of ladies' tables" (BL, 169). It is not in the translated Gitanjali, for which Tagore was awarded the Nobel prize, that these virtues shine through, nor is it in any of the translated works, "much truncated in body and emasculated in spirit" which "gave little idea, and often they gave a wrong idea, of the best Tagore could do" (BL, 1 7 1 72). Additionally, "The more substantial and virile side of his work, such as his social, political, descriptive, and narrative poetry and his poetry of abstract thought, was either never presented at all or was presented in a terribly mutilated and emasculated form" (BL, 167). We are therefore at the mercy of the explicator to raise up the signifying phallus of the Poet. As is so often the case, Tagore is remade in the critic's image. Thus we find him straddling two worlds. Unlike the typical Bengali bourgeois, however, he is literally "planted" in both: Though primarily an Indian, and a Bengali, he belongs, by his delicate mastery of the English tongue, to the English-speaking world. His works are as much the growth of the common Bengali soil as are the grass and the mango groves on the banks of the Bhagirathi, yet they are the product of a supreme culture, one of whose main streams came from Europe. He is, and will always remain, one of the world's greatest international writers. (BL, 173-74) If Tagore belongs to the English-speaking world, why is he unreadable in translation? In what sense does he "belong" if not as a user of language? Through such assertions, it is only the historiancum-literary critic who can present him to us as one more artifact

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in the Oriental exhibit. Here he becomes the perfect specimen: divorced from a history, transcending the "limitations of his age," yet always unapproachable for the cultured European reader, for whom he can remain only a monument to the absolute separation of Bengal from the English-speaking world. Whether it is due to his class background and Brahmoism ("The Tagores were a cultured and wealthy family, and Rabindranath's father, Devendranath, was one of the leaders of the Brahma Samaj" [BL, 174]) or simply a stroke of genius, Tagore's timeless greatness is never explained. He is to Ghosh, however, somehow both more English and more Bengali than either of the other two literary giants. In fact, Tagore is just about everything: musician, novelist, playwright, lyricist, social and political reformer, ardent patriot, anti-Fascist, philosopher, spiritualist, sensualist. He has made all of these streams flow together: "It was perhaps his greatest achievement as a writer to have cut a channel in which the three by no means easily reconcilable influences of ancient Indian, modern European, and popular Bengali origin could happily mingle" (BL, 184). It is one of Krishna's miracles. It would be misleading to characterize Ghosh's History as Marxist, yet it remains one of the most materialist cultural records produced in India before the 1970s, when, under the influence of an actual political victory by the Left in Bengal, a reinvigorated Marxist culture caused a revolution in the writing of cultural history.

4 Transitions: Mediation and Irony

i A D I S P L A C E M E N T I N T H E C O N C E P T of culture occurred as India began to examine its new identity in the 1950s and 1960s, between the achievement of Independence and India's singular role in the new international community of formerly colonized nations. Over a period of some seventy-five years (1870-1945) it had been possible for both liberal and radical reformers to speak of the progress of cultural value in roughly similar terms, but in the post-Independence period it became increasingly obvious that such terminology was no longer useful. After Independence the culture wars simultaneously became more and less important: less important as the immediate site of negotiation with an occupying power as the battle for cultural parity had been won; more important as an explanation for the long persistence of colonialism. Culture now had to be seen as part of the larger system of values and institutions that had regulated elite behavior for over two hundred years. It could no longer be granted the autonomy of disinterested art. Yet the cultural heritage was not to be understood merely in terms of power, and it was the specific valences of the mediatory value of culture that troubled the historiography of the seventies. In the decades after Independence the tendentious function of English acculturation within the colonial context began for the first time to be examined systematically in relation to socioeconomic power. Whereas early cultural historians' accounts of the cultural heritage had only implicitly engaged with the facts of political sub-

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ordination, post-Independence historians overtly began to argue for the retarding effects of European influence on native culture and the hangover resulting from middle-class faith in the values of Westernization and progress. The political success of Gandhism undoubtedly contributed to the view of Western civilization as not the torch but the inferno of progress, but third-worldization and India's entry into the international system as a sovereign state also became relevant contexts in which to rethink the European cultural heritage. Practically, the most important breakthrough among the Bengali historians of these decades was the influence of a renovated Marxism, largely Western in its emphasis on consciousness and ideology but heavily inspired by the actually existing communist societies of China and the Soviet Union. The latter had since the 1920s directly affected Left organization in India, and the new Indian state's cordial official relations with Moscow provided the opportunity for strong intellectual links with Russian diamat historians who shared a preoccupation with the "failure" of the independence movement to snowball into revolution. The radical Left, however, particularly the younger generation sympathetic to the peasant uprising at Naxalbari in 1967, seriously reconsidered M. N. Roy's thesis that bourgeois independence was a dead end, and looked increasingly to the Chinese example as a model for agrarian revolt. These theoretical differences had distinct political echoes. After relations between China and the USSR cooled in 1959, and the Chinese invasion of India in 1962 forced something of a showdown between national and international allegiances, the CPI split into two factions. The Left faction, or CPI (Marxist), managed to win elections in two states. Kerala had been won in 1957 by the undivided CPI, but its Chief Minister, E. M. S. Namboodripad, split with the Left in 1964. West Bengal was captured in 1967 by a Left-Front alliance in which the CPI (M) held the largest number of seats in the state assembly. The CPI (M) in West Bengal split further in 1969 over the Naxalbari incident, with supporters of the uprising forming the more volatile, revolutionary, and nominally Maoist CPI (Marxist-Leninist). This further fragmentation of the organized Left within an already chaotic parliamentary coalition, and with what some considered a genuine revolutionary situation de-

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veloping on the soil, made for difficult practical and political choices among the young intelligentsia. The ambiguities of Naxalite ideology are far too subtle to consider here, but, superficially at least, the motifs that Rabindra Ray has termed the "poverty of the spirit," combatted through an "existential terrorism," significantly colored the cultural historiography of the period.1 In all cases the nineteenth-century colonial middle class emerged as the new enemy of 1970s historiography. Walter Benjamin's aphorism, "Every document of culture is at the same time a document of barbarism," aptly describes the project of this new historiography, which sought the hidden mechanisms by which a European-educated elite could win political freedom for the nation while stopping short of freeing the masses from the nightmare of history. Although olderstyle cultural catalogues continued to be written in defense of elite liberal nationalism—indeed that remained the dominant idiom of cultural history—the most vibrant developments in the field turned markedly to the left, but to a left increasingly diversified by a great variety of new international actors.2 In this sense, the seventies' reinvention of the renaissance as a discourse of power rather than one of expression calls to mind two theoretical developments within Western Marxism that drastically redefined conceptions of social structure and the world-system as "uneven totalities." Louis Althusser's articulation of Marxism with psychoanalysis and structural linguistics reconceptualized the notion of high culture, as in art or literature, in order to designate the specific level of the social totality that is concerned with the reproduction of the means and relations of production. Of course Marxism has always understood art to be bound up with social development, but new attention was turned to the illusion of permanence that art seemed to possess, to the semi-autonomy the cultural heritage seemed to exercise vis-a-vis the pervasive stagnation of the social totality under colonialism. For Althusser, each of the various levels of ideological activity comprising the superstructure (the law, the arts, religion) functioned asynchronously and unevenly, moving with their own chronologies and trajectories, related only "in the last instance" to the economic base and to each other in the fragmented perceptual

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world of mechanical and ideological production. This form of conceptualizing the structure and function of ideology—directed against those otherwise transparent theories of social development that attempted to homogenize the various practices and ideas of a society into a single "spirit" (or Darstellung) of a place or time—satisfied a pressing need to break up the unexamined combination of a Bengal renaissance and British capital, or the equation of Westernization in culture with a unidirectionally "progressive" or "rational" social transformation. More sophisticated notions of mediation came into play that questioned how links could be found between the various strata of ideological production, and from there ultimately back to the economic.3 "The last instance" itself underwent a dramatic re-theorization that produced new ideas about the origins and composition of the classes in the colonial economy, which significantly influenced the conception of consciousness and profoundly affected the notion of cultural production as the spontaneous expression of a rising, European-style bourgeoisie. Within Western historiography was a related new emphasis on seemingly immeasurable natural phenomena—such as the longue durée of geological time or the history of "everyday life"—and on the disarticulation between such formative temporal coordinates and the limited capacity of human subjects to comprehend the influences that shaped them. The work of the so-called Annales school, and its American translations into world-systems and dependency theories in the fifties and sixties, had important repercussions for the study of culture and capital in the formerly colonized world. The most significant innovation in terms of Indian (and, more generally, third-world) historiography was the attempt to conceive of the global economy as a structure that had its roots in the European transition to capitalism—during what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the long sixteenth century from 1450 to 1640—and thus to conceptualize capital's laws of motion as a predominantly European phenomenon that had encompassed the rest of the world.4 Rather than posit a universally applicable theory of transition through which world civilization would progress from feudalism to capitalism to socialism, world-systems theory maintained that capitalization oc-

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curred differentially, depending on the relationship between core and periphery, between the point of capital extraction and the realization of its value. Postcolonial socioeconomic backwardness was not the result of an inherent retarding essence of traditional societies unable to modernize but rather the product of a systematic "underdevelopment" fostered by colonial rule. Underdevelopment (or as Samir Amin has recently rephrased it, maldevelopment) was actually "developed" according to an imperial logic that maintained the semifeudal character of colonies in a highly selective form of capitalist modernity. 5 A dialectical play of difference and identity structured the relationship between the three zones of the world capitalist economy into core, periphery, and semi-periphery. Regions at the core could to a greater degree determine the course of their trading and production relations with the periphery because of their greater concentration of capitalist practices; and due to the fact that interzonal differences in the value of certain commodities was what kept trade going, the logic of profit, rather than progress or transition, dictated the maintenance of core-periphery positions in a relationship of dominance and subordination within the global economy. Wallerstein's schema had the virtue of conceptualizing the entire world-system as a vast interrelated network of relations unified by the historical development of capitalism, but not homogenous within it; capitalism did not develop similarly in all locations because of its own historical logic, which was determined by its European origins and the local peculiarities of the different cultures with which it came into contact. In explaining the failure of British capital to improve the Indian economy, the t w o became historically linked in a relationship of dependency. By the time of the first British transactions in the subcontinent, India had been established as a peripheral zone from which resources and capital would flow into the European core. The British would provide only what was necessary to expand their own profits—the technologies of developing capitalism would not be imported into the periphery, or would be imported only in limited quantities to serve short-term purposes. N o effort was made to mobilize local capital in manufacturing, extraction, shipping, or agriculture, which could lead to native self-sufficiency or compromise

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British dominance. In fact, the reverse process, deindustrialization, accompanied the development of capitalism in India. A voluminous literature charted the collapse of native handicraft production in the wake of Company monopolies, the concomitant urbanization of Calcutta, and the drastic decline of precolonial industrial centers such as Dacca. The new economics helped to explain why Indian capitalism never produced the modernizing benefits it had in Britain, and how the development of native capital in fact helped tighten the reins of political subjection by remaining incomplete.6 What the new economics could not fully explain was the disarticulation between base and superstructure in the specific setting of colonial India. Wallerstein's original scenario called for a rather straightforward exchange between the extraction of peripheral resources and their replacement with legal and political institutions, technical infrastructures, and most importantly, the values of the core states. But India had experienced Westernization out of all proportion to other colonized formations. There simply was no equating colonial India to colonial Africa or colonial Latin America when evaluating the cultural legacy. The progressive inheritance of European acculturation had left India with an overdeveloped cultural sphere in stark contrast to its ruined cities and pillaged industries. To explain this uneven development of the social totality, various mediatory concepts were invented to bridge the gap between intellectual and social development. Wallerstein's "semi-periphery," although not explicitly theorized in this way, could be dislodged from its purely economic moorings and employed as the transfer-point for the importation of ideology. Calcutta had in fact been the second city of Empire, and for over a hundred years people had been proclaiming that Shakespeare was as at home there as in London. Despite widespread economic destruction, the European influence had indeed generated some limited forms of intellectual development, and these now had to be decisively separated from the determinism of economic strangulation. These concepts began to surface in Bengali social and cultural historiography in the early seventies. Among the leading figures of the new historiography were Sumit Sarkar, Asok Sen, and Barun

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De, social historians associated with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Sarkar set the tone in 1972 with a réévaluation of the modernization versus tradition debate for the celebration of the bicentenary of the birth of Rammohun Roy, "the father of the Bengal Renaissance."7 Rammohun's activities, Sarkar asserts, "do signify a kind of break with the traditions inherited by his generation. This break, however, was of a limited and deeply contradictory kind. It was achieved mainly on the intellectual plane and not at the level of basic social transformation; and the 'renaissance' culture that Rammohun inaugurated inevitably remained confined within a Hindu-elitist and colonial (one might almost add comprador) framework." 8 The general trend of the critique is comprehensively summarized by Barun De in a paper delivered at the first Indo-Soviet Symposium on Economic and Social Development of India in Moscow in 1973.9 De analyzed the "multivariate" components of the so-called renaissance and found that it bore little relation to the European model of modernity. Criticizing past historians who had used the term renaissance, he finds in their work the construction of a "liberal Utopia" in the nineteenth century that represented at base a "false consciousness," "an emanation of shame about genesis in dependence to British absolutism" (PSS, 210). Only a reworked Marxist framework, he argued, could adequately assess the relationships between the various layers of social and economic forces, a framework that would recognize that colonialism constituted a specific path through the historical modes of production distinct from that of European modernization. In a careful evaluation of Marx and Engels' statements on transition and the theory of levels, De came to the conclusion that "what Marx and Engels sensed but could not explicate was that in these countries, the dead hand of the past, allied with colonialism . . . exerted a stultifying influence on those forces which could have shaped Asian modernism, dialectically rendering the process of infant modernization half-cocked" (PSS, 187). The incomplete development of capitalist means and relations of production, fostered through the legal infeudination of the Permanent Settlement and the destruction of native handicraft industries, resulted in an unnatural

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class structure that obviously could not reproduce the conditions of modernity in the West. Instead, cultural progress had been confined to an elite stratum of comprador intellectuals operating within the confines of a semifeudal mode of production that valorized social imitation while severely limiting the distribution of the benefits of colonial contact among the lower strata. The social and economic base of all these movements were the new groups created by British rule and the burgeoning townsfolk of the marts, dependent on British commerce and administrative infrastructure. In the Marxist sense of the word, they were not a bourgeoisie. No "civil society" (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) was created by this subaltern middle class who worked within an inevitable framework of alien rule in India. Rather they were a non-organic and non-traditional intelligentsia accepting cultural norms alien from the peasants and artisans, on whose labour surplus they subsisted. (PSS, 195-96)

Thus the early liberal reformers were seen to have carried out their modernizing within a framework of class-interest that was basically conservative. "[Rammohun Roy] wished to conserve the system which had been created by the British land settlements in eighteenthcentury Bengal of which he and his family had been beneficiaries" (PSS, 194, my emphasis). Religious revival movements are similarly attributed to a nouveau riche "whose urban wealth descended by inheritance from the compradors of early British rule" (PSS, 195). The cultural influence of the British consisted, then, in strengthening the class-consciousness of each of these groups, so that instead of "modernizing" the culture into a common, democratic civil society through reason, it in fact created enclave cultures predicated on their difference from each other: "So both [liberal and orthodox reformers] believed in a Renaissance of Indian culture, by which they meant Hindu culture . . ." (PSS, 195, my emphasis). The outcome of such a class- and religion-based cultural legacy was communalism: "the Muslim concept of Renaissance . . . led not to anti-communal national unity . . . but to the spirit of Partition in the 1940s" (PSS, 209). Fostering cultural renaissance could be seen as an incendiary tactic in an overall strategy of divide and rule. While De's own break with the past radically challenged the progressive inheritance, it was not one-sidedly negative, and he still

Transitions: Mediation and Irony maintained, like the older materialists, that Westernization had introduced some progressive elements into Indian society: "Renaissance as a vehicle of intellectual transition for the nineteenth century intelligentsia is part of the forces stultifying the Indian peoples as well as giving them a forward-looking vision'" (PSS, 209, my emphasis). The more properly dialectical claims of the new materialism demanded a dual perspective on the colonial legacy, much as Marx and Engels had called for in the Communist Manifesto when they pronounced capitalism simultaneously the most dynamic and the most devastating development for its patrons: "The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now being turned against the bourgeoisie itself."10 This ability to look both ways, characteristic of what tropological theory terms irony, is an essential ingredient of seventies historiography. While on the one hand, it was argued, Westernization had resulted in a "stultifying" check on the possibilities of autonomous, indigenous social development, it could also be seen as a motor of progress in other areas, most notably in the cultural sphere, however Utopian, shameful, or predicated on false consciousness. In other words, despite the radical intentions of the break with the liberal narrative of colonial improvement, Western rationality was still seen as a double-edged sword that cut in two directions, and not only the cloth of liberal reformism. Using forms of argumentation developed in Europe for an explanation of Western social reality, seventies historiography relied heavily on imported methods of historical materialism, which it confidently reconfigured to suit the uneven developments of colonial India. While this form of critique offered a breakthrough from the impasse of liberal or radical nationalist histories, as well as from the regional chauvinisms and Eurocentrism of forties materialism, it also inherited several legacies of Marxist thought that proved more difficult to accommodate to the Indian setting. Among them was the faith in the possibility of emendation and adaptation of Marxian laws to suit the hitherto unexplored social terrain of South Asia; more important, I would argue, was a somewhat traditionalist refusal to deal seriously with aesthetics, as if detailed attention to art and culture more broadly constituted a kind of bourgeois decadence.

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Roughly contemporaneous with the massive European challenge to Marx's theories of the Asiatic mode of production (in Hindess and Hirst's Pre-capitalist Modes of Production [1975], among others),11 Indian historians were retooling Marxian science to serve as a theoretical correlate to the actual advances of socialist politics and economics on Indian soil. A t the same time, however, little attention was paid to the other revolutions within Western Marxism, as in other European traditions, on aesthetic thinking. One can only speculate as to the institutional and ideological reasons for this unevenness in the reception of European Marxism in India, and a detailed history of this appropriation is sorely needed. In conclusion, De called for "a new theory of colonialism and its consequences: of the transition of the mode of production from pre-colonialism through colonialism to forms of stultified and dependant capitalism" (PSS, 212-13). A central tenet of seventies historiography was that the entire liberal-reformist impulse of the nineteenth century operated from within the ideological bind of an immature middle class unable to achieve hegemony. Unlike in the West, where the historic rise of the bourgeoisie had produced the consciousness necessary to engineer the great democratic revolutions of England, France, and America and inspire the strong nationalist assertions of Germany and Italy, the colonial Indian bourgeoisie was not strong enough to realize its national aspirations. Not only was the class of colonial "elites" decisively separated from the productive forces of the economy, but at every step in its coming to consciousness it encountered powerful checks to social reform by English policies that often artificially froze certain practices into "traditions" and identities in order to define and control different groups. In the identification of martial and intellectual races, for example, military recruitment was disproportionately North Indian while civil service positions were disproportionately filled by Bengalis. Hindus and Muslims were similarly defined and differentiated on the basis of supposedly scriptural precedents, necessitating separate systems of law. Along with the systematic underdevelopment of the colonial economy, in which the Bengali "bourgeoisie" was not even the most productive class, the superstructural effects of colonization contributed to the vision of a tightly bound,

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if maldeveloped, social totality that mirrored the larger economic forces holding capitalist development in check. Thus the early "noninterference" social policy of the East India Company—which was avowedly designed to reduce the causes of native irritation and hence the likelihood of insurrection during the early years of Company rule—took on new meaning in the context of the seventies, where it was seen as an intentional and explicit attempt to disallow the reform of backward social practices. Rather than the essentialized view of traditional culture as inherently backward, a constructionist position began to emerge that saw "tradition" itself as an invention of Company practice and policy. Later, as the British settled in and began to make themselves comfortable, redesigning the Indian social fabric to suit their own image (as with the wide-scale institution of state education after 1854 and the ascension to the Crown in 1858), the bureaucratic framework of the Raj itself functioned to resist social innovation by refusing to appoint native reformers to positions of power in government. The central materialist dictum that being determines consciousness was being rigorously rethought vis-à-vis social being. However radical the réévaluation of the class status of the colonial bourgeoisie, the specific function of culture still remained dependent on an overly reflectionist theory for the determination of consciousness. The greatness of nineteenth-century culture was reconceived as the product of a "false" consciousness stemming from a misrecognition of its "real" conditions of production, the conditions of a dependent bourgeoisie unable to fulfill its destiny. This implied that a more accurate consciousness would have recognized the real conditions of colonial dominance and would have addressed them accordingly. Apparently, one of the great reformers of the nineteenth century did recognize this truth, but not until the end of his life, when he was powerless to address it. A towering figure of the renaissance, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820-1891) campaigned tirelessly for the reform of many traditional Hindu practices, most famous among them the prohibition against widow remarriage, the tolerance of polygamy, and the taking of child brides. He also worked to establish vernacular mass education, particularly for women. He is often re-

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ferred to in literary histories as the father of modern Bengali prose for his "judicious mixture" of the literary and spoken languages in his many textbooks and adaptations of classic Western literature into Bengali. But Vidyasagar's efforts largely failed, and his great aspirations and achievements take on a tragic tone in Ashok Sen's pathbreaking study Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and His Elusive Milestones (1977). After a lifetime of dedicated service to social causes, the great reformer retired, a broken man. Although he understood that it had been the peculiar structure of colonial society rather than any personal failing that thwarted his efforts, "the isolation that followed consumed itself more in the solitary anguish of a noble individual, than in any clearer understanding of a strategic socio-political alternative to all that Vidyasagar felt to be so false and worthless around him." 12 The specific conditions for his failure were to be found in the composition of the colonial middle class. [T]he new Bengali middle class, whether affluent or aspiring to rise in wealth and respectability . . . owned no role of advancing the production econo m y — t h e potentiality or conditions of a class which would necessarily be concerned over the integration of science and p r o d u c t i o n . . . . Such an identity was ruled out by the colonial process of deindustrialization and the evolution of a system of landed property without the o u d o o k and orientation of productive enterprise. ( / C F , 36-37)

In exploring the contradictory subject-position of this stultified middle-class identity, Sen created a kind of colonial psychobiography to define the constraints under which Vidyasagar's progressive intentions operated. This attention to consciousness within the materialist framework opened a new episode in the réévaluation of the renaissance myth, especially powerful for its grounding in the new economics. The life of Vidyasagar inspired a comprehensive study of individual identity within the context of colonial underdevelopment. In Sen's account, Vidyasagar's individual genius is "undone" by the retarding action of his society: "the middle class was not marked by the fulfillment of an economic function to advance social production. This is where Vidyasagar found no adequate complement to his urge for reforms. The goal of his individual identity was undone in the

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historical character of his social situation" (ICV, 85). Such a mechanist perception of the historical field and the possibilities it holds out for personal advance debunks the emphasis on great men and great deeds that pervaded earlier liberal histories organized around individual achievement. The choice of Vidyasagar for this sort of project is in itself significant, for his work, more than that of any of the other renaissance figures, depended on collaboration, group action, and the pragmatic task of bending the colonial bureaucracy to implement his plans. Far from being a solitary genius creating immortal poetry, Vidyasagar was the quintessential man of action. Yet, tragically, nothing got done. Indeed, Vidyasagar's contribution to the indigenized Westernism of modern Bengali literature suffered a fate similar to that of his social reforms, as Sen's examination of the famous prose style shows. Sen is partially able to address the question of mediation, the so-called "third term," through which the relationship of economic processes to the production of consciousness can be understood. The creation of a distinct literary style in any context is never solely an individual effort, as it presupposes a universe of received tradition against which certain innovations mark themselves as unique. To Sen, Vidyasagar's prose style possesses mediatory value in attempting a symbolic resolution to the contradictory drive for modernization among gifted individuals in a society kept backward by colonialism. "The fusion of tradition and modernity . . . was embodied in his creation of a coherent and elegant style of Bengali prose, in articulating its ability to assimilate and express worthwhile knowledge from the West. . .. [Vidyasagar] provided an opportunity for his countrymen . . . to acquire the rudiments of new knowledge in their own language ..." (ICV, 49). Caught in a tragic web of socioeconomic underdevelopment, the unique, personal identity of Vidyasagar, himself a thoroughly modern and forward-looking individual, was defeated by the retarding weight of incomplete modernization: "His efforts met with little success" (ICV, 49). Sen's use of the mechanist argument central to Marxist histories is appropriately combined with a tragic emplotment, as individual destiny is undone by the invisible hands of fate—in this case the institutional structure of British rule.

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Appropriate, too, is the radical implication of this charge against the nineteenth-century inheritance that seems to call for a complete dismantling of the colonial educational structures, which were designed to promote a vocational and superficial learning and were therefore more efficient at churning out clerks and functionaries than true thinkers or social reformers. Lest this happy colligation of historiographical "affinities" mark him as typical of some universal historian, however, Sen's tone takes on important resonances that lend this work a fascinating complication that situates it specifically in seventies Calcutta, as we will see below. Vidyasagar's "chaste style," as it is called, preserved the Sanskritic background of Bengali culture while adapting the learned language {sadhu bhasa) of tradition to meet the needs of the spoken tongue (calit bhasa) of the marketplace, of finance and trade, and of popular reform. It was the most successful attempt of its time to infuse the vernacular with Western scientific concepts while maintaining the distinct rhythms and flow of the popular language. But this linguistic innovation could not overcome the institutional restraints imposed on the population by the colonial machinery. Without the support of a widespread vernacular educational system, Vidyasagar's many textbooks, which were important in themselves, failed to find an audience capable of fully assimilating the new knowledge in any comprehensive sense.13 Ironically, however, the chaste style developed by Vidyasagar did act as a medium through which English liberal ideology could be disseminated to a wider number of native elites, and it thereby sped the dissemination of English ideology to the bhadralok, but without compensatory reform at the lower levels. Although Sen's study does not go on to discuss the province of the literary, in which perhaps a more complicated notion of mediation might be found, he does imply that the development of the native cultural system would remain a secondary and artificial form in the struggle for advancement: "it revealed that a mask, and never a mission, of enlightenment was the true affinity of the Bengali middle class . . ." (.ICV, 50). To term seventies cultural historiography "ironic" in White's sense is to invoke a complex combination of sophisticated Marx-

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ist analysis—with its mechanistic laws of argument—and a self-conscious distancing from the tragic truths such a radical perspective reveals. Irony is "metatropological," a style of language characterized by the air of sophistication through which the speaker seems to assert greater comprehension over the actors and events he is describing. Additionally, irony manifests a dialectical view toward the very language of description and observation; it is "radically self-critical with respect not only to a given characterization of the world of experience but also to the very effort to capture adequately the truth of things in language. It is, in short, a model of the linguistic protocol in which skepticism in thought and relativism in ethics are conventionally expressed."14 To add that the ironic stance is hostile to practical political solutions is almost redundant; any settled version of the "facts" will be subject to the corrosive self-consciousness that proclaims all views partial and all action ideologically motivated. "Irony tends to dissolve all belief in practical political action."15 The ironic consciousness of seventies historiography is manifested in its dual stance toward both the laws of history and the value of historical description. History repeats itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." But for the seventies historians—themselves dependent on the progressive legacy of Enlightenment reason, on the nationalist and internationalist ideologies that had led them to the present crisis, and on the forms of academic, "middle-class" institutions under which they worked—the discomfort of being true beneficiaries of the cultural heritage charged their writing with the imperative to break the chain of inheritance. Middle-class identity was the true enemy, and the dilemma of escaping it an urgent preoccupation. Thus in Sen's account, a sincere admiration for the personal achievement of Vidyasagar occasionally mingles with disbelief. Relying so heavily on the description of the colonial economy as stultifying, Sen is not always able to account for the uniqueness of his subject. How was this inspiring figure able to escape the mediocrity of his class? Did he in fact escape? As he unwittingly promoted a vernacularized Westernism through his modern prose, Vidyasagar perhaps played an ironic role in propping up the legitimacy of British rule. "The line of demarcation between comprador and nationalist

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bourgeoisie is perhaps of little avail for explaining Vidyasagar's experience" (ICV, xiii). A number of opposites were operative in the context of Vidyasagar's struggle to secure the strength of a social reformer. As we have indicated, there was the problem of achieving an identity true to the real purport of new knowledge and its humanism. But the sources and effects of the same knowledge were not connected with appropriate economic and social innovations to confirm a new leadership. In consequence, an iU-afforded waste of ideas was necessary as surrogates ofsocial advance to sustain the truthless abstractions of progress under British rule. The same scheme of contraries bore upon Vidyasagar's effort, however distinct and heroic it was as a pursuit of social engineering. (ICV, 89, my emphasis) Are Vidyasagar's efforts to be seen as "surrogates of social advance" that only in theory prolonged the abstract equality of English and Indian? With his own class dragging him down at every step, could not his nationalism also ironically serve the purpose of confirming British dominance by marking its progress over "superstition and senseless custom" (ICV, 93)? In a brief but illuminating attack on the "Cambridge School" historians Anil Seal, Jack Gallagher, and Gordon Johnson, Sen debunks the notion that Vidyasagar's reformism was characteristic of "elite" behavior. "Under such circumstances, the category of 'elites' acts as a subterfuge to hide the principal issue of classes without social hegemony . . ." (ICV, 93 n.226). Thus the nationalist bourgeoisie are not to be seen as elite; their consciousness was dictated to them from above. Yet the question remains of how to distinguish national from comprador within a determinist view of class, for Vidyasagar clearly was headed in the right direction. The principal issue is class, which determines the efficacy of his intentions, but Vidyasagar's identity is distinct and heroic by virtue of being utterly unlike that of his bourgeois countrymen. Three decades after Independence, the example of Vidyasagar still holds relevance for the young Indian state. "It is not for us to sit in judgement over Vidyasagar. . . . The story points to broader effects of imperialism than are usually considered in settling profit and loss accounts of our so-called modernity. In this sense the power of colonial darkness did not cease with the country's political inde-

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pendence. Time and again, the cause of reason, enlightenment and even socialism has met with reverses in its ability to reach deep into the roots of our society and people. This is where Vidyasagar's experience has contemporary meaning" (ICV, xiv). A far cry from nationalist celebration, the renaissance is now seen as the cause at the origins of the failure of the postcolonial Indian state. The emptiness of the present, "our so-called modernity," requires a reinvestigation of the principles that have installed it. This implies a radical questioning of the contemporary beliefs, values, and institutions that originated in the colonial encounter. A significant phase of the Naxalite movement, when it spread to Calcutta in the early seventies and began involving students and other intelligentsia, was the murti bhangar andolon or "breaking statues movement," during which busts of nineteenth-century cultural heroes were unceremoniously destroyed. Ashok Sen's Vidyasagar, for all its sympathy and insight into the failures of a great man, could be said to be its academic sequel.

II It is not surprising that with such limitations acting on the bestintentioned of the middle class, historians interested in the development of Indian anticolonialism would look to other sectors of the population to find the forces that eventually shaped the mass movement, as well as those that did not. Most importantly, these historians sought to re-valuate the role of the middle class in that process. Marxists had stressed the contributions to official nationalism made by the immense underclass population, and the Gandhian legend maintained that Independence was a movement "of the people." In the seventies, however, the contradictions generated between the mass movement and its elite leadership became a preoccupation in historiography. Whereas Cambridge School historiography had stressed "elite conflict in a plural society," or infighting and position politics among the nationalist leadership,16 Indian historiographers grew dissatisfied with this narrow focus and increasingly turned to

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the "subaltern" as the locus of oppositional energy that did not maneuver within the thematic of nationalist discourse, thereby attempting to avoid the cunning of reason to which it fell prey.17 Ranajit Guha's reading of Dinabandhu Mitra's famous nineteenth-century play, Nildarpan ("The Indigo Mirror," i860),18 provided a harsh critique of middle-class culture within the context of a rural uprising. The play represents the revolt of Bengal peasants against European indigo planters who for approximately fifty years had been forcing peasants to cultivate the cash crop under inhumane conditions. For at least two years before the publication of the play, Guha points out, the Bengali press had been publicizing the "tyranny of the European planters" ("ND," 2), and by i860 "the regional grievances and localized acts of resistance among the peasantry snowballed into a general uprising in nine Bengal districts" ("ND," 1). Nildarpan had long been considered a landmark text for liberal nationalist culture, but in Guha's reading it captures none of the "music of a clash of arms between the peasant and his oppressors" ("ND," 41). Nor does it in any way "realistically" portray peasant life or peasant oppression: the peasant hero is "a pseudo-peasant and a pseudo-rebel" ("ND," 41). According to Guha, the play and all the publicity surrounding it—Mitra was sued for libel, the publisher of the English translation was briefly jailed, and his bail posted by one of Calcutta's leading citizens19—along with the "liberal-humanitarian" response the play had generated over the years, should be seen together as "a nice little middle class myth . . . that [served to] comfort a bhadralok conscience unable to reconcile a borrowed ideal of liberty with a sense of its own helplessness and cowardice in the face of a peasant revolt" ("ND," 2-3). The central contradiction of middleclass consciousness is squarely located in its respect for law and its belief in the overall justice of English rule, as if allegiance to the Queen imparted to Indians the same basic rights as to British citizens. This belief in the universality of right, according to Guha, is essentially theological, a naturalization of abstract principles masquerading in the guise of common sense. It is so powerful among the Englisheducated elites that it erodes the sense of comradeship in oppression, which is nonetheless deeply felt but finally impotent in the face of fear and respect for British authority:

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To the extent that with all his growing association with the big city he has, still in the eighteen-fifties, vital links with the village, he feels both his economic position (as one who lives off the peasantry) and his socio-cultural authority (as a member of the rural elite) threatened by the planters.. . . But he would not take up arms. . . . The only way to end oppression is for the law to assert itself. ("ND," 3 - 4 )

Thus the play functions in nineteenth-century bhadmlok society— and we must wonder how comprehensively this insight can be applied to other monuments of the cultural heritage—to resolve a fundamental tension in the contradictory group sympathies of the "bourgeoisie." Guha's invocation of "myth" here, and his insistence on restoring social and historical contingency to the abstract concept of justice, is reminiscent of the roughly contemporary theories of mediation arising from French structuralism. The fact that Guha can relegate the supposedly universal applicability of liberal values to the realm of the "mythological" and perform the estrangement from the natural that is demanded by the early work of such thinkers as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss marks the first tentative attempt within Bengali cultural historiography to work toward a more systematic understanding of the function of culture as the medium that holds society together. The significance of this step is vast, for it marks the moment of a rupture with the persistence of what I have termed (for historical convenience) "the liberal aesthetic."20 If we recall for a moment Barthes's definition of myth as a second-order semiological system, we can appreciate more fully the depth of Guha's insight into the important mediatory function of high culture within the political, economic, and social confines of a colonial state. For Barthes, myth is the signifier of a sign; beyond the arbitrary relationship of signifier and signified within the sign, familiar from Saussurian linguistics, myth rakes off a second level of meaning, forming a "motivated" (nonarbitrary) connection between the form of the sign (which is essentially empty) and a "meaning" or content that can be ascribed to this form. Whereas a first-order semiosis is empty, myth pumps the form full of meaning. Barthes offers two examples: the agreement of the predicate in a Latin sentence, and a black soldier saluting the French flag. The simple Latin

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sentence "because my name is lion" becomes charged with surplus signification greatly in excess of its immediate referential value as a grammatically correct statement, accruing connotations of a larger situation that "will attract my whole existence: Time, which caused me to be born at a certain period when Latin grammar is taught; History, which sets me apart, through a whole mechanism of social segregation, from the children who do not learn Latin; paedagogic tradition, which caused this example to be chosen from Aesop or Phaedrus; my own linguistic habits, which see the agreement of the predicate as a fact worthy of notice and illustration."21 Similarly, with the black soldier saluting the flag, a routine military exercise (how often performed in India!) is transformed into a coherent ideology of Empire as transparent and ineffable as common sense. (Barthes's example: "The French Empire? It'sjust afact: look at thisgood Negro who salutes like one of our own boys?)22 Unlike the non-motivated, contentless form of the sign, myth is intentional and essentially ethical, and this last quality, to Barthes, grants it its particular ability to produce nausea.23 Mythification is the process by which socially constructed significations are passed off as nature and historically situated discourses assume the timeless stasis of the eternal. In Guha's example, the Nildarpan phenomenon is much larger than the meaning produced by the written text of the play. The play itself signifies a realistic description of peasant resistance to landlord oppression, but the Nildarpan myth englobes a universe of liberal bad faith in which the form of the play provides a vessel into which the entirety of ironic content of middle-class consciousness can be poured. Instead of admitting the historic role that the artificial middle class has played in allowing, maintaining, and benefiting from the colonial exploitation of the peasantry, the urban bhadralok see themselves in the indigo mirror as similarly oppressed. At the same time, the liberal mythology of oppression and its just punishment is flexible enough to account for a reverse identification by which the bhadrahk imagines itself as retainer of the principle of justice to which the planters are called to account. Thus "middle-class identity" is an oxymoron. Bhadralok consciousness is to be found exactly where it is not, wavering on the brink of an ethnic solidarity among

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Indian compatriots wearing the label "oppressed," all the while proclaiming the high standards of law and order it claims to enforce. 24 The bhadralok is simultaneously the oppressed Indian peasant and the universal subject of Enlightenment reason, and of course neither. Not unlike the facial painting of the Cadhuveo indians in LeviStrauss's The Raw and the Cooked, which enacts a symbolic resolution to a real contradiction between material (kinship structure) and ideological tensions (the prohibition on incest),25 the nineteenth-century Calcutta bhadralok deployed a borrowed ideal of high culture to mediate the essential contradiction between ethnic- and class-based sympathies. A feeling of ethnic solidarity in suffering urged them to support the peasants against the British and to view the case of peasant oppression as an attack on themselves; yet their class character bound them to the regulative ideological mechanisms of respect for law and order. The middle-class myth revolving around the occasion of the play thus mediated the contradiction generated by a clash between a desire (to side with the peasants) and a prohibition (do not violate the law). The supposedly radical play served to assuage the bourgeoisie's feeling of helplessness in regard to both the peasants' struggle against the planters and their own efforts to accept the "stultified" capitalism bequeathed them by Empire. Guha's snide indictment of this bifurcated consciousness again reveals the ironic gesture increasingly adopted by radical historians to quarantine the negative legacy of English acculturation: "Colonialism had by then found its social base in a neo-feudal class of its own creation and its cultural base in an emergent middle class capable of combining traditional values with a received, western-style enlightenment. Reform had struck roots. The 'classes' were queuing up for B.A. degrees and jobs" ("ND," 11-12). Recalling Sen's account of the new prose style of Vidyasagar, we can see a more complex and far less sanguine view of the mediatory function of cultural production taking shape. The description of Vidyasagar's style as a "judicious mix" is appropriate indeed— it embodies in language the capability of the bhadralok to repress the contradiction between traditional values and Western enlightenment by streamlining its speech and writing into forms that merge

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the two. This capability manifested itself in deference to the prime ideological directives of British citizenship: justice and order. One could term the mediation of culture here juridical or disciplinary, as well as judicious. There is an even more ironically debilitating side to Sen's resolution theory of cultural production given in Guha's account; beyond soothing the troubled conscience of the bourgeoisie, the demand for the perpetuation of law and order, which meant suppressing the peasant revolt, also fed into a similarly schizophrenic perspective on the social order as a whole. O n the one hand, the bourgeoisie called for conserving intact the traditional structure of class antagonism, which itself had led to the revolt against the modernizing effects of the planters who in typically violent fashion were introducing industrial capitalist agriculture into the countryside. O n the other, it demanded legal reforms that assisted the emergence of a new middle-class actor in the rural districts. The play's depiction of a family of middle-class landowners makes it quite clear that, along with the urban bourgeoisie, a rural middle-class group also opposed the planters' depredations. This was the rural moneylender, whose most lucrative source of income was drying up because of the peasants' reliance on the indigo planters as sources of credit. Guha quotes Benoy K . Chowdhury: "The poor ryot was caught in a cross-fire between . . . two contending systems of usury patronised respectively by the planter and the landlord both of whom were equally interested in appropriating the peasants' surplus. . . ,"26 Guha adds, "Dinabandhu M i t r a . . . a 'progressive' writer, was at the same time striking a blow, however unconsciously, for an emergent class who . . . benefitted most from the indigo rebellion" ("ND," 37-38). If that were not enough, this troubled view of middle-class identity split along the axes of race and class must also contend with the overarching pressure of the colonial state, which almost leads to a form of conspiracy theory: all this, anyway, was just one more elaborate example of divide and rule. The bourgeois outcry generated by the play was exactly what the government wanted all along: [The planters'] indulgence in torture, murder, rape and arson made the natives question the superiority of the white man's religion, civilization, and morality. The long-term interests of the raj, therefore, demanded that the

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planters should be disciplined. . . . On the whole, the anti-planter agitation had all the official wind in its sails. This is quite clear from the complicity of the Lieutenant-Governor and the Secretary to the Bengal Government in the translation, printing and circulation of Neel-darpm. ("ND," 12) With a cynicism worthy of French conspirateurs such as Foucault and Baudrillard, Guha conceives the entire political/cultural event as a "simulation" designed to breathe a sense of reality into a situation heavily coded by the regulative ideological apparatuses. By carefully orchestrating and subsidizing an outburst of liberal protest, the government is able to reaffirm, within a tightly circumscribed sphere, its capacity to tolerate dissent and accordingly to restore faith in its selfprofessed commitment to liberal government. If mythology is intentional, as Barthes asserts, it is difficult to locate its point of enunciation within a structure of mimicry that has both official sanction and native consent. Read historically, the tenor of Guha's critique can be seen as a sophisticated example of the radical revision of Marxist cultural theory that followed the Naxalite movement of the late sixties.27 Perhaps the most lasting effect of the impulsive radicalism of the period was its exacting look at specific relations of power.28 How did representations of class ideologies in Nildarpan support the interests of the rural moneylender against the peasant? What was the ideological role of the urban intelligentsia in collaborating with state power to suppress a revolt? What were the specific tactical goals of the peasant movement itself, and were they in any way compatible with those of the collaborationist bourgeoisie? Finally, though still only in rudimentary form, rose the question of the value of literature and how to read texts: when juxtaposed to the violent and heterogeneous history of lower class or "subaltern" insurgency, the aesthetic triumphs of bourgeois culture took on a decidedly different aspect. "High culture" was blind, reactionary, and escapist in its attitudes toward the lower classes; and, in its emulation of European realism as a style for depicting reality, it actually functioned to marginalize and suppress the voice of native protest in which it was purporting to speak. The great advance marked by the seventies, as with the desire for Marxism more largely, is its insistence on totality in formulating these questions and finding ways beyond them.

5

Subaltern Studies: Radical History in the Metaphoric Mode

The history of subaltern groups is necessarily fragmented and episodic. There undoubtedly does exist a tendency to (at least provisional stages of) unification in the historical activity of these groups, but this tendency is continually interrupted by the activity of the ruling groups; it therefore can only be demonstrated when an historical cycle is completed and this cycle culminates in a success. Subaltern groups are always subject to the activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up; only "permanent" victory breaks their subordination, and that not immediately. —ANTONIO GRAMSCI, Selectionsfrom the Prison Notebooks . . . The critique is by its very nature still rather precocious, incomplete and generally endowed with all the immaturity of a thing in its formative stages. But it is this very want of maturity that drives the critique audaciously, if not prudently in every instance, to probe those fundamental contradictions o f the existing system which prefigure its demise. —RANAJIT GUHA, "Dominance Without Hegemony and Its Historiography"

I W H E N VIEWED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE o f seventies history, t w o distinct strands o f a solution t o the dilemma o f colonial middleclass consciousness can be seen t o have emerged in recent years. O n e strand sinks m o r e deeply into the "collaborationist" middleclass consciousness that Barun D e so roundly castigated in the early

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seventies and that Marxist historians had decried since at least the mid-thirties, hoping to see in it an enabling duplicity that might offer an opening for criticism. The second strand attempts to bypass the bourgeois delusions of the cultural heritage by "sinking into the subaltern." Both are necessarily related. The former will be discussed in the concluding chapter of this book. The latter takes its name from Subaltern Studies, a series of publications edited by Ranajit Guha beginning in 1982.1 Opening the subaltern perspective can be described as the invention of a break through the impasse confronted by middle-class consciousness. I will limit my comments here to Guha's contributions, which should not be taken as representative of the group's varied researches (he has been its major theorist, but never a programmatic voice), but which are characteristic of the spirit animating the formation of the Subaltern Studies project. I do so since, in my opinion, Guha more than any of the other contributors to the series maintains the strongest links with the specific traditions of cultural history writing in modern Bengal, even as his call for a new historiography declares itself a radical break from the past. This closeness to the object of inquiry is what charges his statements with their characteristic flamboyance; in their radicalness they can be seen as closing a chapter in Bengali cultural history. To this end, I read his substantial oeuvre synchronically, for while various interests brought to the Subaltern project have necessarily changed its direction, I feel that Guha's work possesses an internal consistency whose basic problematic has remained coherent over two decades. I will argue that the Subaltern project does not so much uncover a new object for history writing as show us how history is written, and in the process it attempts to pay the debt to Europe that has always been seen as the nemesis of writing cultural history in colonial India. As we saw in Guha's earlier analysis of Nildarpan, by the midseventies the renaissance legacy had been substantially revised, and its greatest achievements could now be seen as expressing a duplicitous class interest. This ambivalence, tragic because unavoidable, marked even the most complex and beautiful expressions with the guilt of betrayal. Subaltern Studies attempts to rewrite the history of colonial and postcolonial India by resetting the parameters of historiogra-

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phy itself. It hopes to short-circuit the logic of complicity between indigenous and colonial elites by setting out to find a new object (of desire?): now not a nationalist or ethnic identity, and far less a civilizational advance up the evolutionary scale, but rather a field of heterogeneous forces that either resisted the "official" nationalism of the Congress or had no access to the symbolic discourses of nation forming.2 The impact of this "field" on the anticolonial movement has never been accurately registered in either colonialist or nationalist history writing. Perhaps its telling will unlock new dimensions of the Indian reality. The field is described in the project's opening manifesto as the "politics of the people. For parallel to the domain of elite politics there existed throughout the colonial period in India another domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors . . . were the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country, that is, the people. This was an autonomous domain, for it neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter."3 Guha is clearly appropriating a narrow definition of "subalternity" here, at variance with the earlier usage we had seen in Barun De, for whom the term designated the "subordinate" middle class. This shift in valence of the term partially reflects an evolution within Indian historiography's understanding of the work of Antonio Gramsci, whose writings were introduced to Bengali historians through the teaching of Susobhan Sarkar in the late 1950s, contemporaneous with their first English translation.4 In more recent uses of the term, "subaltern" seems to have returned to its earlier broad strokes, as when Partha Chatterjee wrote in 1994 of middle-class subordination as "the subalternity of an elite."5 A first, cursory understanding of the term subaltern should therefore alert us to a certain mobility in its usage. Guha's definition explicitly attempted to return to the original Gramscian perspective, in which "subaltern" designated the lower strata of an underdeveloped society lacking in "naturally" revolutionary classes. For Gramsci, the term subaltern, used interchangeably with "popular classes" or "masses," described the inferior social positions of a small industrial and agricultural proletariat subsisting

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alongside a massive peasantry, all of whom were "left out" of the historic formation of the Italian state in 1870. The risorgimento was a "revolution without a revolution," or a "passive revolution" that captured state power for the moderate bourgeoisie through the exercise of hegemony, "intellectual and moral leadership" over the policies of the weak opposition parties, rather than by winning the allegiance of the people.6 Far from the assertion of a popular, "national" will, the Italian state was formed by men who "were not capable of leading the people, were not capable of arousing their enthusiasm and their passion. . . . They said that they were aiming at the creation of a modern State in Italy, and they in fact produced a bastard. They aimed at stimulating the formation of an extensive and energetic ruling class, and they did not succeed; at integrating the people into the framework of the new State, and they did not succeed." The consequences of that failure were "a paltry political life . . . the fundamental and endemic rebelliousness of the Italian popular classes, the narrow and stunted existence of a skeptical and cowardly ruling stratum . . . and . . . the sullen passivity of the great mass of the people... . They made the people-nation into an instrument, into an object, they degraded it."7 Crucially, Gramsci notices that in Italy the subaltern strata "are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a 'State.'" Thus "the historian must record, and discover the causes of, the line of development towards integral autonomy, starting from the most primitive phases; he must note . . . every assertion of an independent will and its efforts to break with those above it and to unite with those of others in its class."8 In developing a movement to unseat the hegemonic bourgeoisie, "every trace of independent initiative on the part of subaltern groups should therefore be of incalculable value for the integral historian."9 In India, where power has historically been consolidated by a minority at the top, and where even the colonial bourgeoisie that led the freedom movement numbered a mere fraction of the total population, the lower strata are immense and extremely heterogeneous. Were they to come to account in any representative reckoning of the populace, they could exert on the democratic process an influence of catastrophic proportions. The existence of such immense and highly

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diversified subaltern strata within the postcolonial state, prevented from forming adequate political coalitions that might include them in the processes of state power, obviously casts severe doubts upon the representational validity of the state and raises provocative questions about the eventual destiny of "the people." For the study of history, it is clear that any understanding of anticolonialism as a mass movement must come to terms with this overwhelming majority of lower-strata agents, who were selectively mobilized for nationalist agitation but did not participate in the ideological and practical debates of elite leadership.10 In an interesting move, Guha's massive study of peasant revolt under the Raj, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, attempts to analyze subaltern consciousness in what he calls its " 'pure' state, before the politics of nationalism and socialism begin to penetrate the countryside on a significant scale."11 In focusing on this "pure state," Guha hopes to isolate the "general form" of the "theoretical consciousness" of the subaltern, a consciousness in which conservative and radical tendencies battle each other "in order to arrive," as Gramsci puts it, "at the working out at a higher level of one's own conception of reality," that is to say, free and independent.12 Guha finds that this consciousness in its "pure state" consistently struggled against itself to assert its radical side, most successfully when it expressed itself in rebellion. Rebellion signified the true vocation of the peasant: to end his oppression and assert his independence by turning things upside down. This did not necessarily mean that peasant rebellion needed to manifest itself as systematic, long-term, or horizontally based to be conscious of the forces that denied the peasant freedom; but rebellion did indicate a basic "political character" at the heart of subaltern identity. Guha's great contribution is having restored to history the record of 110 peasant rebellions spanning 117 years of British occupation, a history that at once counters British assertions that they ruled the subcontinent by consent as well as orientalist visions of India as the land of tranquility. The subaltern identity was "political" inasmuch as "the existing power nexus had to be turned on its head as a necessary condition for the address of any particular grievance"

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(EAP, 8). British power permeated every level of rural structure under which the peasant labored, and the rebellions thus translated back in every case to a social arrangement in which the Raj could be seen to play some determining part. This link of peasant rebellion to colonial power situates it as a countertradition to the nationalist freedom struggle, the failures of which had been amply detailed by the previous generation. Perhaps by virtue of their very exclusion from elite politics, the subaltern strata escaped the immense resources of middle-class bad faith exposed by seventies historiography. Guha's overriding preoccupation is to challenge the vocation of mainstream historiography, which has consistently misrepresented the middle class as speaking for the Indian nation. "We want to emphasize [subaltern consciousness's] sovereignty, its consistency and its logic in order to compensate for its absence from the literature on the subject" (EAP, 13). In this context it is tempting to read Guha's "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India" in the first volume of Subaltern Studies as a manifesto explicitly arising from the impasse of the seventies. In this inaugural statement he tends to separate elite and subaltern realms into mutually repelling existences, defying Gramsci's emphasis on the necessary interrelation between them. Gramsci insists that subalterns must "attempt . . . to influence the programs of these [dominant] formations in order to press claims of their own," making the history of subaltern groups "intertwined with that of civil society and thereby with the history of States and groups of States." Gramsci clearly states that the history of subaltern organization "can only be demonstrated when . . . this cycle culminates in a success," that is, in revolution.13 He is far too skeptical of the power of history writing, which is by definition always in the service of the state, to believe that subaltern experience or "consciousness" can be adequately represented by a state whose very survival depends on repressing such consciousness. "Only 'permanent' victory breaks their subordination." Is Subaltern Studies in fact premature? Guha claims that "the experience of exploitation and labour endowed [subaltern] politics with many idioms, norms and values which put it in a category apart from elite politics" ("OSA," 5, my

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emphasis), and "there were vast areas in the life and consciousness of the people which were never integrated into their [elite] hegemony" ("OSA," 5-6, my emphasis). He thus implies that a truly alternative historiography can be written of subaltern existence that does not rely on the colonial or national state for its characteristic forms. In fact, as he asserts in a later article, the precolonial Indian reality persisted throughout the British period as a "distinct paradigm" with only tenuous translations of the dominant idioms of English rule penetrating its exterior, thus reducing all British representations of the "Indian reality" to the thinnest veneer ("DWH," 232-70). In stressing the radical difference, if not complete alterity, of subaltern politics, Guha stretches Gramsci's term here, if he is borrowing it at all. Though he fully admits it is not the case that "these two domains were hermetically sealed off from each other and there was no contact between them" ("OSA," 6), he does imply that subaltern consciousness was unpredictable and imminent, characterized far more than bourgeois nationalism by a tendency to accelerate into revolt, and thus properly unrepresentable in the sober annals of respectable history writing. Subaltern consciousness was so volatile that, once aroused, it terrified even nationalist leaders with the threat of "things getting out of control." As such, "pure" subaltern consciousness remained outside the capacity of mainstream historiography ("the history of States") to record it with any accuracy. Far more frequendy, elite historiography is charged with recording the suppression of peasant revolts, writing the subaltern out of its history. Elite nationalism and its historiography are characterized by a "relatively greater reliance on the colonial adaptations of British parliamentary institutions" and are "more legalistic and constitutionalist in orientation . . . more cautious and controlled" ("OSA," 4-5). By separating the spontaneity and volatility of subaltern politics from the parliamentary decorum of both the national freedom struggle and its historiography, Guha implicitly unseats the claims to legitimacy of both the independent Indian state and mainstream academic history writing. "The Prose of Counter Insurgency" provides a textbook example of how the tools of literary criticism can be used to unravel the truthclaims of historical discourse and restore the subaltern as agent of his own history.14

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The reasoning seems as much theoretical as practical. The independent Indian state is the last and most dramatic legacy left over from colonial rule; it stands as the living testimony of the Raj's influence on the constitutional forms of life in postcolonial India. Yet according to Guha the independent Indian state, like the Raj, exercises a "dominance without hegemony" in its replication of European forms of law and politics, a replication that neither sufficiently considers the specific nature of Indian reality nor adapts its principles of representation to fit that reality. Combined with the uneasiness toward the cultural legacy that seventies historiography revealed, Subaltern Studies begins to appear as an attempt within the realm of disciplinary historiography to counteract the negative effects of previous efforts at representing the complexity of Indian life in the name of something else—the people, the nation, the culture, the state. Cambridge historians of the post-Independence era had repeated this gesture with disastrous results. Anil Seal, for one, had claimed that Independence was a mere outgrowth of imperial governance: "The British built the framework; the Indians fitted into it" ("DWH," 295). This to Guha is a mere continuation of James Mill's early colonialist plan of writing Indian history as "an interesting portion of the British History." Subaltern historiography, by contrast, will escape the falsity of such elitist forms of representation by self-consciously measuring the distance between the official forms of history writing and the inscrutable objects they claim to represent. To do this, it is crucial that subaltern historiography restore an "outside" to what has previously passed for "the Indian reality." For if the bestowal of colonial ideology onto the subject population was indeed as partial as Guha claims, vast territories of incomprehension must exist alongside the English-educated upper crust that were never incorporated into the patterns of dominance and were therefore unrecognizable as forms of conscious thought. These territories could include knowledges, practices, traditions, and techniques having the ability to resist, subvert—or just ignore—the intrusion of Eurocentric modes of governance and representation. The immediate problem for the academic historian is to find the calling of solidarity that can place him, as a member of the elite camp, within this circle of erstwhile compatriots. Methodologically, it would be both

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too easy and too politically disabling to simply reject the tools of European history, partial as they are, as has been done as much in certain strains of Afrocentrism as in Indian revivalist movements.15 Instead, Guha turns to a Western Marxist tradition indelibly colored by Hegel to uncover the historical "difference" between the consciousness of dominator and dominated. "Where then does criticism come from? From outside the universe of dominance which provides the critique of its object, indeedfrom another and historically antagonistic

universe..."

("DWH," 220, emphasis in original). "It must begin, in short, by situating itself outside the universe of liberal discourse" ("DWH," 228-29). Subaltern historiography must do both: it must relocate the subaltern as a site of energy oppositional to both colonialist and nationalist projects of domination, and it must resituate the practice of historiography as one that "takes sides" with this subaltern project, rewriting what has passed for knowledge. It is both a discovery and a reorientation, an operation which, by demanding a new object of knowledge, will reorganize the practices through which the object is studied. "The task of historiography is to interpret the past in order to help in changing the world and such a change involves a radical transformation in consciousness" ( E A P , 336). Whose consciousness? If Guha's manifesto polemically overstates the alterity of the category "subaltern," at least in relation to Gramsci, it does so within a methodological self-consciousness that recognizes a pressing need to begin this rewriting immediately. Definitions may be seen as part of an overall strategy. "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India" opens with the declaration: "The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism— colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism" ("OSA," 1). In his contribution to Subaltern Studies II the following year, Guha asserted that even the contemporary Indian historians who displayed sympathy for subaltern actors were enmeshed in the colonialist mindset of "tertiary discourse," a form of writing that denied the subaltern its agency and thus participated in a form of neocolonialist "counter-insurgency." "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

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to acknowledge the insurgent as the subject of his own history. . . . Tertiary discourse, even of the radical kind, has thus distanced itself from the prose of counter-insurgency only 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" ("PCI," 38-40). How can the subaltern ever rely on historiography to "recover his place in history"? As Gramsci attested, the recovery of subaltern agency within the discourse of history would pose a fundamental challenge to both the historical tradition and the state; indeed its writing can occur only when the "cycle is completed . . . [and] 'permanent' victory breaks their subordination." Guha's admission that the Subaltern "critique . . . is still rather precocious" strikes one as utterly honest in this context, and one must search for logics that explain its continued audacity. If subaltern history will not bring down the state overnight, it may be capable of illuminating the insufficiency and arbitrariness of the state's historiographical tradition up to now, and of instilling an awareness that new tools of practical research and theoretical analysis are needed. How far can we go in acknowledging this claim? Subaltern historians clearly continue to practice something that looks like "history," and they do it, moreover, by drawing on many of the great European traditions of historical method as well as on archives held in the service of the state. And Guha's claims to have discovered history's "outside" are not unproblematic. Beyond the "pure state" of the theoretical consciousness examined in Elementary Aspects, the actual definition of "subaltern" given in Subaltern Studies I deserves closer scrutiny. At the end of Guha's lead article an appended note defines the terms "elite," "people," and "subaltern." Here Guha unambiguously, though somewhat elliptically, states that subaltern is a situational term, in contrast to its earlier alterity. It is used synonymously with the term "people," and the two are defined by their "difference" from the elite. "The social groups and elements included in this category represent the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the 'elite'" ("OSA," 8, emphasis in original). In deciding on the specificity of this

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"difference," the historian must determine when particular groups or elements are acting "in conformity to interests corresponding truly to their own social being" ("OSA," 8, emphasis in original). Elites acting in their own interests are fairly easy to identify; more ambiguous are members of inferior social strata acting in the interests of the elite. Still more ambiguous are those fallen from grace—the "lesser rural gentry, impoverished landlords, rich peasants and upper middle peasants who 'naturally' ranked among the 'people' and the 'subaltern'" ("OSA," 8)—the proliferating scare quotes seem significant—who did not act in proper conformity to their social being at all times. Finally, subalterns really seem subalterns for themselves only when their actions correspond "truly to their social being," and thus only when they act antagonistically toward their oppressors. Is the term "subaltern" then reserved for the lower classes only when they are insurgent, or does it cover larger sections of the population when they rise up, as did the middle and elite classes in 1942 and 1946? "In spite of such diversity one of its [subaltern activity's] invariant features was a notion of resistance to elite domination" ("OSA," 5). A subaltern seems most properly a subaltern when he or she is in rebellion, and one must decide when this rebellion is directed against elite domination, as opposed to local grievances, to determine its ultimate consciousness. Determining this difference poses a fundamental choice for the historian, one that will declare whether his or her work will escape the complicity of tertiary discourse: "it is up to the historian to sort out on the basis of a close and judicious reading of his evidence" ("OSA," 8). It is the historian who is the final arbiter of "social being" and the "truthfulness" of the actions that conform to it or not. Similar perceptions of the arbitrary and constructed nature of the historical enterprise color postmodern historiography in the West, but it is somewhat jarring to hear this assertion made in relation to both the earthiness of its subject matter and the assertions of authenticity—"pure form" "corresponding truly to their social being"—that accompany it. In this respect I think it is a mistake to characterize Subaltern Studies as a wholesale rejection of Western Enlightenment Reason along with British historiography, as some reviewers have done. Instead, it seems more correct to characterize it

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as a strong rereading of Hegel—of whom Alexandre Kojéve would be one precursor—rather than an outright denunciation of Reason as such. Guha's emphasis throughout is on the historic failure of the British to perform up to their stated rational ideals, a failure that extended from economics to general improvement, education to historiography. Far from rejecting Enlightenment categories, Guha resolutely challenges the claims of British rule to have measured up to its proclaimed liberal ends. He locates the misery of the colonial situation in this practical failure rather than in any more philosophical deficiency of Reason itself. Needless to say, the definitional slippage in the term "subaltern" alerts us to a theoretical error in the valuation by the historian of the "true" or "proper" consciousness of the subaltern. It is one thing to return historiographical authority to the Indian historian, but something different to insist on the purity of the object that the historian is called upon to judge. This circularity, which informs Guha's methodological procedure in Elementary Aspects as well, can be charted as follows: subaltern consciousness has never been accurately recorded by elite historians; subalterns themselves do not leave historical records that could be admitted as new evidence to the historical record; any search for subaltern consciousness must be an interested interpretation by historians committed to its recovery, and must be limited to correcting the inaccurate records of their predecessors. Thus a "proper" subaltern historiography is a logical impossibility, since subaltern consciousness in itself can be retrieved neither through existing accounts nor through previously unexamined records. Any account of such indecorous people acting "properly," "in conformity to interests corresponding truly to their social being" must be a selfconscious fiction, since neither accurate observers nor recorded statements accord with what is imputed to be the "true social being" of the subaltern. Thus if a separate and autonomous subaltern domain can be said to be retrievable to history, its only necessary condition is its "antagonism" to the realm of the elite, since neither articulated utterance nor accurate interpretation of historical records can mark its appearance. In the tenaciously dialectical spirit of the argument, the sub-

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al tern becomes everything that elite discourse is not: its Other. Guha does not press this point far enough: if the subaltern is truly history's Other, then it cannot by definition be "included" within history's discourse. Or rather history can never speak its "proper" name; subalternity can be felt only through its symptoms as they arise in history's discourse and disturb its smooth appearance. These symptoms are then subject to all the misapprehensions, contradictions, and mistaken identities of dreams. No "true" identity can be apprehended in the mirror; as Lacan reminds us, the specular image of the "I" is both fiction and asymptote, a condition of partiality that will remain "irreducible," "whatever the success of the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve as I his discordance with his own reality."16 With such constraints acting on the recovery of an authentic subaltern consciousness, the only task that can be left for historians is to read mainstream history in a new way, searching out oppositional moments from the textual record and interpreting them anew. Chatterjee is thus surely right in calling Guha's method of retrieving subaltern consciousness a "mirror image" of the counterinsurgent documents used to supress it, a "paradigmatic form" rather than a "history of this consciousness as a movement of self-transformation."17 As such, as Lévi-Strauss commented on his own structural method, it is a "myth of mythology"; subaltern historiography is the "myth" about an object, subaltern consciousness, itself unknowable outside the immediate context of its articulation.18 While Guha's formal dexterity in rereading the documents of counterinsurgency is impressive and provocative, as he displays to great effect in "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency" and "Chandra's Death,"19 it remains by necessity a far cry from recovering an authentically historical subaltern voice from the ashes of time. Having revealed the very nature of middle-class ideology to be mythological, is Guha here trumping his earlier work? Is Subaltern Studies actually the myth of middle-class mythology? Nildarpan attempted to identify the urban middle class as protectors of the rural peasantry, compatriots in colonial oppression. Does Subaltern Studies identify the radical historian as the true agent of subaltern consciousness? If the project seemed somewhat theoretically idealist from the

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start, perhaps its very existence, however feasible in the long term, could generate certain immediate benefits. Sumit Sarkar commented on the project's ambiguities in his contribution to Subaltern Studies III (1984), in an article which, from almost the beginnings of the project, began to push its theoretical limits to extremes. As a historian Sarkar found that "a serious problem in some 'subaltern' writing has been the tendency to concentrate on moments of conflict to the exclusion of much longer time-spans of subordination or collaboration."20 He suggested that documents of subaltern antagonism do not unambiguously reveal subaltern "participation in anti-imperialist struggle." In fact, in the Bengal countryside from 1905 to 1922, mobilizations around local grievences such as banning cow-slaughter or contesting price hikes were far more common than overt acts of resistance to British rule. The relation between subaltern activity and anticolonialism is extremely detailed: "one does not automatically lead to the other without a variety of complex mediations in which the specific socio-economic structure of a region, historical traditions, efforts at mobilization by the elite . . . and British strategies all play a part" ("CNS," 276). Nonetheless, Sarkar claimed that he could deduce a "collective mentality underlying apparently very different forms of popular militancy in the period under study. Certain recurrent patterns do seem to emerge... . Something like a very tentative 'structure' of popular militancy can be reconstructed in the LéviStraussian sense of an implicit, perhaps largely unconscious logical system lying beneath the surface of myths, beliefs, values, and activities" ("CNS," 277). Whether in deference to the spirit of the project as a whole or through a kind of oblique criticism that takes its references for granted, Sarkar refrained from taking the next decisive critical step toward Guha's manifesto. He could well have done it through his allusion to Lévi-Strauss, had he followed his own reference and considered the famous and devastating rejoinder to the French anthropologist written by Jacques Derrida in 1967.21 Briefly, Derrida called into question the concept of structure altogether as a legitimate organizing tool for the social sciences, illustrating how all structures depended on a paradoxical point or "center" which served both

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to ground the structure and to permit the infinite play of its elements. Lévi-Strauss, by positing a "reference myth" from the Bororo people of Brazil as the center of his structure of primitive mythology, showed how all subsequent variants of the myth served to emphasize its same basic features. Rather than take the regional or chronological differences of the myths into account as illustrations of variation between the people who told them or in the social contexts of their telling, Lévi-Strauss hoped to illustrate the parameters of a coherent pensée sauvage common to all primitive peoples and every bit as logical and orderly as that of the European engineer. But by assuming that every variant of a myth contributed to the overall structure of this "savage mind," Lévi-Strauss committed two fundamental errors. The first error was in assuming the principle of totalization: that his system could account for any further variants that should arise. This assumption logically demanded that all myths function in essentially the same way, which undercut his assertion that variation was significant in itself. The second error was the inverse of totalization: empiricism. If the centrality of the reference myth was to be proved by the manifestation of its structure in all subsequent variations, then all the variants must be collected. One deviant example would be enough to bring the structure crashing down. Derrida thus showed that the very positing of a central reference myth was an illusion presupposed by the decision to analyze it structurally. The center of any structure is in fact outside the structure; it is the point that "escapes the structurality of the structure," and as such is both arbitrary and theological: arbitrary because the supposed centrality of the ur-myth was in fact decided at random by the researcher; theological since its very positing would govern the subsequent shape of the structure itself, like the God of Christian cosmology. Not itself subject to the rules of the structure it governs, the center is a site of endless deferral rather than the locus of a stable presence. Derrida calls the entire history of Western philosophy the "history of such substitutions of the center." For a project committed to the "science of the concrete," as was Lévi-Strauss's, this observation seriously undermined its claims to accuracy. One center could be substituted for another without altering the structure; and this quality revealed the nature of the stable center to be its very opposite: play.

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Similar charges could be leveled at a "structure" of subaltern consciousness. Not all popular militancy could be considered as acting in conformity to its true social being. Was there never any collaboration between peasantry and reactionary forces? If subaltern insurgency always acted "in conformity to interests corresponding truly to [its] social being," then how could the sheer quantity of this interest possibly have been resisted by the elite? Why hadn't it snowballed? Could the very "center" of Guha's structure, the proposition that subalterns rebelled against oppression, be substituted for another, equally verified by empirical observation—that they didn't? In his essay, Sarkar refrained from recalling this already-classic challenge to the concept of structure, and one wonders if the hesitation—like that of the editors of Selected Subaltern Studies in choosing not to reprint Sarkar's essay in their introductory selection—is intentional and in some sense permissive.22 On one hand, both the theoretical and practical ambiguities in Guha's definitions are troubling and have troubled the subsequent history of the collective, although probably no more so than in other "history from below" movements.23 On the other hand, the rhetorical force of recovering "people's history" in the context of decolonization is persuasive. Even if subaltern consciousness as theorized here is finally unrecoverable in fact, it remains a crucial Utopian aspiration for a fully decolonized historiography, and should be pursued to the point where its very nonattainment begins to stretch the bounds of "acceptable" history. Elite nationalist leaders well understood the rhetorical value of popular history when they recorded their own versions of the freedom struggle as rebuttals to the official British story and encountered censorship and repression in the process. Nationalist autobiography is replete with references to the mobilization of the masses in the cause of decolonization, and today "common sense" says that Gandhi and other elite leaders in India were solicited organically by an upsurge of the popular will. That assumption, however historically inaccurate, lent tremendous moral force to the elite's demand for a self-governing state. Subaltern Studies does posit a large-scale resistance to domination on the part of the peasantry, but it parts company with nationalist history in refusing to interpret this resistance as directed solely

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or even predominantly against the colonial rulers. Subaltern insurgency, in its proper relation of antagonism, could just as surely be directed against the nationalist leadership as it was toward local landlords, tax collectors, health inspectors, schoolteachers, and other forms of authority that impinged upon its autonomy. The question then becomes one of specific antagonism: does the historian define "correct" subaltern behavior by its causes or by its effects? Does "true accordance with social being" describe any resistance to oppression or only those with some consciousness of establishing an alternate social order outside colonial or nationalist rule? Guha asserts that the structure of subaltern rebellion is politically conscious: "Insurgency . . . was a motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses" ("PCI," 2). Yet this assertion cannot unearth a more recognizable "history," based on records or other facts, of wide-scale organizations to support its claim. Structure becomes more determining than historical fact; the structure of subaltern consciousness in its pure state in essence overdetermines the historical record and, if it can be accepted, must be accepted as the radical failure of previous historiography to have recorded its appearance. Guha claims that in its paradigmatic form subaltern consciousness is in fact organized and "political," but this organization shows no lasting traits that could be extrapolated into an actually existing historical movement, or what Gramsci termed a "historic bloc." Javeed Alam noted this seeming contradiction in his review of Subaltern Studies I. "Can autonomy be equated with episodic actions, whatever be the sources or motivational mainsprings of action?... In none of these studies do we find any evidence from which it could be inferred that the domain of peasant politics had come to acquire the character of a stable condition that defines the availability of concrete options and choices for these classes or strata in a long term sense."24 Guha emphasizes that the paradigm of authority and rebellion reappears "cyclically over the centuries" rather than as a continuous or teleological development (EAP, 335). Yet the question remains: if the possibility of peasant insurgency remains merely imminent or cyclical, how does that affect the rewriting of history? To Gramsci, the Italian peasantry clearly lacked any sense of

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organized leadership and required intervention from intellectuals to provide it: "given the dispersal and the isolation of the rural population and hence the difficulty of welding it into solid organizations, it is best to start the movement from the intellectual groups." 25 Guha's peasants, by contrast, seem to possess a pure, antagonistic consciousness that defies homogenous leadership, yet unites them on the basis of this common consciousness. In Elementary Aspects, their territoriality is overcome by its negation, the ability to define one's identity by what it is not. All outsiders come to symbolize potential sources of disturbance which generate common, if unconnected, forms of resistance.26 Guha's strategic use of Gramsci thus results in both a contraction and an inflation of the term subaltern. In its contracted form, on the one hand, it seems to confine the definition of subaltern to a perpetual mobilization against the dominant groups in society. Although Elementary Aspects is a monumental contribution to the study of this sort of underclass revolt, a great mass of additional scholarship will be needed to challenge the prevailing view of Indian passivity. Far more prevalent in the existing historiography is Marx's view, famously indigenized by D. D. Kosambi, that India has remained a country of torpor, inactivity, and "the idiocy of village life." 27 When joined by such an authoritative and committed voice as Sarkar's, the reminder that collaboration as much as resistance characterized the longue durée is well taken. On the other hand, in its inflationary form antagonistic behavior can lift great masses of mid-strata actors into the properly subaltern realm of "conformity to interests corresponding truly to their own social being." Against this backdrop of rural mobilization, two dimensions of middle-class consciousness emerge more vividly. The first is the almost complete neglect, as evidenced in their historiography, by urban elites of the realities of rural India. The second is the striking juxtaposition of the interests of the colonial elite and those of the masses. Subalterns acting truly are capable of intense and farreaching rebellions. But "elite subalterns" acting untruly can be revealed with greater accuracy to be a failed bourgeoisie incapable of exercising hegemony over the masses it claims to speak for. In fact, this may be the real object of the theorization of the subaltern as

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"outside." Even as the outside is unapproachable in theory, its postulation as a Utopian impulse drives the inside to come to terms with it, to confront its lack of revolutionary conviction as the experience of defeat in opposition to the "true" revolutionary consciousness of the authentic, imagined subaltern.28 If "subaltern" is just a transposition of "subordinated," as it seems to be when applied to the colonial middle class, then the mildness of middle-class nationalism pales in comparison to the glorious spontaneity of its rebellious countrymen. Is subaltern, in short, a sociological category or an attitude:1 Indeed, the project's subsequent publications indicate a shift from studies of agrarian relations, rebellious hillmen, and peasant revolt to imaginary institutions, urban domesticity, and the disciplinary practices of elite mobilization.29 Perhaps the concept of the subaltern is, finally, a provocation, a theoretical fiction designed to prod the middle class into awareness of its own historic complicity in disciplining the masses it could never learn to represent. We have seen how the floating, situational definition of subaltern as antagonist can result in a rather static binary. In fact, in Elementary Aspects Guha begins with an epigraph from Buddhist scripture that indigenizes the famous Hegelian dialectic of lordship and bondage, a marvelous simplification of struggle in a country divided not only by class but by caste, foreign occupation, religion, gender, region, and numerous other factors. Guha's epigraph records the Buddha exclaiming in amazement to his disciple Assalayana, "Have you heard that in Yona and Kamboja . . . there are only two varnas [castes], the master and the slave? And that having been a master one becomes a slave; having been a slave one becomes a master?"30 As they both know, this simplification of antagonism into master and slave is impossibly idealistic. But the reduction of the multiplicities of struggle serves a strategic purpose: by rewriting resistance in absolute terms, it seriously challenges the legitimacy of elite dominance. This subjects all its ideologies of caste, religion, and obligation, as well as its historiographies records, to serious doubt. In the specific context of India, this was above all a pragmatic, short-term strategy, subsequently outgrown. Partha Chatterjee concurs: "The point, therefore, is no longer one of simply demarcating and identifying the two do-

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mains in their separateness, which is what was required in order first to break down the totalizing claims of a nationalist historiography. Now the task is to trace in their mutually conditioned historicities the specific forms that have appeared, on the one hand, in the domain defined by the hegemonic project of nationalist modernity, and on the other, in the numerous fragmented resistances to that normalizing project." 31

II Guha's work goes on to complicate this dichotomous view of resistance. But in terms of the first few volumes of Subaltern Studies it is possible to see the positing of a static binary—however questionable —as a necessary first step. The Indian middle classes achieved independence at the expense of their underclass compatriots. The exploits of middle-class leaders are well researched, but the story of their collaboration with English power and their betrayal of the immense and heterogeneous underclass remains untold. Subaltern consciousness is predicated as autonomous in order to deduce the possibility of an "outside" from that of middle-class collaboration. By doing so, a new Indian culture will spring into view: not the canonized cultural heritage, but the culture that resisted all forms of domination through the long night of foreign occupation. The emancipated bourgeoisie has its national hero in the figure of Gandhi. But as Ajit K. Chaudhury observes, up to Subaltern Studies V (1987) there is a profound "silence in subaltern studies: Lenin." 32 It is a silence in name only; the entire project points toward an overlooked vanguard party without being able to name it as such. Without historical records that could prove the existence of the Indian Lenin, radical historiography becomes the agent for releasing the full potential of popular mobilization. History may not necessarily find something new, but it will do something new: it will rewrite its past from a perspective never before considered, and in the process it will revolutionize that story. If the search for the "outside" is a structuralist fiction, pursuing it a certain way may serve to reorganize the procedures of the inside—an inside-out revolution. The subaltern thus becomes a technique more

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than an object, a "perspective," as Veena Das has framed it, more than a person.33 Guha's impatience is directed toward his contemporary Indian colleagues, but the real antagonist can be seen as the whole disciplinary apparatus of "elite historiography," running from early colonial records and memoirs to administrative accounts right through indigenous nationalist and explicitly leftist histories. None of these representational vehicles has so far produced an "Indian historiography of India." The methods of narrative analysis he explicates in two articles in particular, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency" and "Chandra's Death," and which he uses to unseat the truth-claims of previous appropriations of this material, could equally well be turned upon any truth-claims, including his own. Guha seems so aware of this danger, however, that his appeals to the alternate truths revealed through his methodology must be placed in quotations. The "truth" produced by subaltern readings will be the self-conscious production of "truth-effects." Historiography as a discipline is to be understood as a class-bound exercise in self-legitimation; nonetheless, it is immensely important as the tool—along with literature—that "helped the bourgeoisie to change or at least significantly to modify the world according to its class interests in the period of its ascendancy, and since then to consolidate and perpetuate its dominance" ("DWH," 215). This proposes a dual stance on the nature of historiographical inquiry: retaining the strategic strength of history as a discipline which arose, along with the bourgeoisie, with the division of knowledges in the European universities of the late eighteenth century; and at the same time usurping the claims of European historiography to be the objective, legitimate custodian of global history, replacing them with the greater verisimilitude of the marginal knowledges uniquely available from the perspective of the subordinated. Coming as they do from history's "outside," these knowledges may well be expressed in forms more closely allied to the "story" that lies at the etymological root of "history." Subaltern historiography will replace liberal/colonialist historiography as the authentic utterance of the colonized Indian people. Having lost its formal tools of legitimation, the bourgeoisie will wither away.

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This self-consuming rhetorical strategy, combined with the ambiguous definition of subalternity and the immediacy of Guha's political demands, allows me to proceed with a reading of Subaltern Studies somewhat against the grain of its stated intentions. Rather than accuse his theoretical statements of idealizing subaltern politics as a space sealed off from and therefore uncontaminated by elite nationalism, I find it more pertinent to read Guha's texts as a methodological auto-critique directed at displacing the authority of the accepted traditions of both indigenous and foreign historical discourse. Guha's rewriting of Indian history is double edged. The point is not to speak for or in place of the subaltern—that project's disastrous history is certainly not to be repeated—nor is the point to achieve the impossible ideal of allowing an unmediated subaltern voice to speak through the historian's work. Rather, much closer to Gramsci, the historical activity is being reconceived as a transactional project in which the traditions of acceptable history writing are transformed by the objects they wish to represent. "Elitist historiography should be resolutely fought by developing an alternative discourse based on the . . . recognition of the co-existence and interaction of the elite and subaltern domains of politics" ("OSA," 7, my emphasis). An alternative discourse is not necessarily a diametrically opposed one, although at times, to be sure, Guha's rhetoric can lead one to believe that the historian is uniquely positioned to reclaim such an unmediated subaltern consciousness. Frequent mentions of "truth," "reality," "restoration," and "reclamation" mark this project as a redemptive one that will restore misrepresented accounts to some version of a historical "real," but the juxtaposition of such claims against theoretical tools for de-realizing their effects leave their "real" status ambivalent. I would argue that the postulation of the subaltern can be seen as the blind spot that undercuts any historiography's claims to representational validity. Serious reflection on the possibilities of identifying subaltern consciousness will necessarily challenge the social status of the observer; this will entail a new self-consciousness about the practice of historical studies in general. The seeming paradox between observer and observed is amply illustrated in "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency," the methodologi-

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cal blueprint that claims to restore subaltern agency by debunking its prior historical inscriptions. But however noble the cause of an 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. . . . 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 excercise 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. ("PCI," 33) "The best one could hope for." Had these words remained firmly in view, much spurious searching after authentic voices could have been avoided. Subaltern consciousness is always mediated by the historian. The point is not to retrieve the subaltern, but to bring the historian closer to the realization of the inherent fictionality of his work. The essential difference between Subaltern Studies and earlier Marxist approaches to Indian history (even when that historiography looked to "the people") is in the mediatory concepts associated with the historical activity itself. What sets Subaltern Studies apart from the self-professed and often idealized populism of early Indian Marxism is its interrogation of the complex mediating apparatus between the recorder of an event, who is by definition a member of the elite camp, and the object of inquiry, the "autonomous," "heterogeneous," and "spontaneous" subaltern insurgent. Far from claiming the subaltern as an unambiguous or clearly knowable object of history to be objectively recorded by the historian, Subaltern Studies problematizes the very act of doing history. Subaltern methodology seems as much an analytical tool for debunking inaccurate truth-claims as one designed to produce new narratives about "what happened in the past." It is a quintessential bricolage: borrowing from literary criticism and

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taking the historical text as its object, or approaching a cultural or interpretive anthropology when it turns to kinship structures and rituals in order to interpret in a new way a particular event recorded in official historical sources such as court records or administrator's diaries, Guha's procedures relentlessly resituate events within a thick description that restores their contextual immediacy. But this new context is no more "true" than any other narrative choice; the high methodological claim for this procedure is often that by dismantling and reaggregating the biased methods and materials of the colonizer's accounts covering a particular event, the contemporary historian can "reclaim the document for history" ("CD," 135). But what is history? As opposed to the colonial judicial discourse examined in "Chandra's Death," for instance, we find that a definition of "history" emerges only in opposition to the procedures of the law. Turning an event into a legal case involves "detaching an experience from its living context and setting it up as an empty positivity outside history. It is a process intended to take out of these statements all that stands for empathy and pity and leave nothing to show for their content except the dry bones of a deixis—the 'then' and 'there' of a 'crime'" ("CD," 140). The work of "history," by contrast, is to restore "empathy and pity" to this "dry" account, contextualizing the story within new borders that make it a "tragedy" of "women's solidarity and its limitation" ("CD," 165). Guha recreates, far from a "true" story, a context for Chandra's grim fate that is designed to "heighten its drama" ("CD," 148). By illustrating the process through which historical accounts are constructed, all prior historical work is exposed as the cobbling together of data and context to produce an effect of authenticity. Partha Chatterjee writes, with some irony, "The project then is to claim for us, the once-colonized, our freedom of the imagination."34 Guha provides the tools both to free the imagination from colonial appropriation and to begin interpreting this freedom once it has been won. I have three points in conclusion. First, by exposing "the possibility of the impossible" in recovering subaltern consciousness as the locus of an authentic imaginary, the Subaltern Studies project reminds us that all identities are imaginary and that there can be no

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going back to some nostalgic point of origins, no pre-linguistic stability before the signifier, no "subaltern" before its inscription in the texts of counterinsurgency. This is quite different from claiming that the subaltern as such does not exist empirically on the ground. The scandalous fact exposed by Subaltern Studies is that this existence has escaped historical narration. This theoretical/practical point as much ensures the longevity of history as a disciplinary procedure as it debunks the authority of its practice. Rather than a mere objective recorder, the historian simultaneously serves as recoder, scribe, translator, and inventor. Second is the related practical point that since there is no subaltern consciousness before its articulation, and since illiterate insurgents keep few records of their activities, the search for subaltern consciousness can only be continued by rethinking what constitutes a text. Veena Das offers a pointed practical agenda when she writes: "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."35 This redefinition of legitimate sources challenges both the reliance on written (mainly British) documents on subaltern activity up to now and the related rules and norms of academic history writing as a discipline. If the subaltern is to speak, it is high time that speaking subjects were introduced as evidence, and not solely in the coerced forms in which their "statements" appear on the peripheries of essays.36 Opening the disciplinary bounds of history to other forms of textual production through which the "subaltern-effect" can be read would necessarily ally it with what passes as "cultural studies" in the U.S. academy today: unstable combinations of literary analysis, anthropological description, gender marking, sociological conditions of production and reception, and the mediation of all these forms that makes the practice of history extremely risky business—and all the more worth doing. Finally, we turn to the dimension of power. Let us assume for heuristic purposes that a subaltern consciousness, in whatever form, can be recovered from the historical record. If we do so, the Freudian dilemma of transference returns with a vengeance. In its most lim-

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ited form, transference signals the analysand's active participation in producing the narrative he or she thinks the analyst wants to hear.37 If the subaltern is interviewed in its position "as subaltern," that is, in relation to an elite historian, what is to prevent him or her from telling a story he or she might think will satisfy the customer? That possibility should be entertained in the most positive light: subalterns can actually write their own histories outside the conventions of acceptable historiographical style. In the other direction, countertransference designates the possibility that the historian-analyst will tend to speak in the place of the analysand, preinterpreting historical meaning from an always already occupied position of mastery. By displacing the class categories of Marxist historiography in order to examine the autonomous space of subaltern insurgency, the largest claim of Guha's project aims at an analysis without transference, a history that would let the subaltern speak in full self-possession of his or her words. As Freud himself argued, such a relationship, if possible, would form the analytic ideal. If the symptom rather than the analysand could speak up, what would it say? But we know this is impossible for two reasons: the analysand cannot fully possess his consciousness, neither for himself nor for others, and the analyst is in no position to do anything about it. So what if the subaltern speaks? The real point is that the symptom is speaking all the time, but it is easier to repress than to redress it. Or, as perhaps in the case of the larger Utopian desire that the Subaltern project attempts to articulate, many may hear the symptom speaking but very few do anything about it. The bottom line, as always, is the power of any imagined historiography to effect social change. Guha suggests, however—and this I would argue is the necessary and insurmountable challenge of the Subaltern Studies project as a whole—that such a historiography is possible. It intends to produce not merely a popular history but an Indian history, one better adapted to the totality of Indian social and political life, by which is meant not only the 2 or so percent of ruling elites who have traditionally made history, but the vast and uncharted multitudes who possess the potential, if heard, to liberate India from the ideological hangovers of colonial rule and postcolonial corruption by expos-

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ing the immense realm of the "un-said" of everyday life. According to Guha, the call for "an Indian historiography of India" that originated with Bankimchandra Chatterjee in the late nineteenth century "amounted to nothing less than challenging Britain's right to rule India. In other words, no historiography of colonial India would be truly Indian except as a critique of the very fundamentals of the constitutive power relationship of colonialism itself"38 By implication, the new historiography of Subaltern Studies amounts to a continued critique of the textual power relationships of a neocolonialist project of knowledge, challenging the standards of acceptable historiography. Yet it must practice history in order to change it; as did the European bourgeoisie, so must the decolonized radical historian: "historiography [is] one of the two principle instruments—the other being literature— which would . . . be put to use" in reclaiming the Indian past. To my mind, this insistence on practice largely reclaims the project from the various criticisms charging it with a philosophic idealization of the subaltern as a Rousseauist subject in nature, or with poststructuralist overtones to debunk the authority of Western Reason as a whole. Gayatri Spivak registers this positive ambivalence when she asserts that the project is self-consciously metaphysical, enacting a "strategic essentialism" whereby the movement to "retrieve the subaltern consciousness [is] the attempt to undo a massive historiographical metalepsis and 'situate' the effect of the subject as subaltern . . . in a scrupulously visible political interest."39 I find it indicative of the moment at which subaltern historiography emerged that it should serve as an example of what Spivak terms "affirmative deconstruction" while its practitioners could resist being recast in the language of postmodernism: using "the force of anti-humanism . . . even as they share its constitutive paradox: that the essentializing moment, the object of their criticism, is irreducible."40 Must this declaration of fictionality—parametric distortion, strategic essentialism—mark the larger claims of the project as mythopoetic? Recalling Derrida's critique of Lévi-Strauss, are we indeed in the hands of a methodology that declares its referential value as a conscious falsehood, and thus in an area of irresponsibility? Certainly not. In the larger institutional framework of Indian academic

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history, which has struggled mightily for fifty years to deliver the event of Indian independence to its nationalist elites, the eruption of the rebellious peasant as the covert agent of independence represents the unthinkable. It is a "terrifying form of monstrosity,"41 a possibility that something new and unseen, but something that has secretly conditioned all the visible actions of history past, will emerge as the hidden organizational principle of the present.

Ill The radical implications of Guha's positions become even clearer when juxtaposed with White's account of the acceptable modes of history writing in the West. Indeed, this most linguistically conscious of Indian historians embodies a tropological configuration seemingly of his own ingenious design, just as much as the subaltern is designed to boondoggle any conception of an acceptable subject of history. Essentially writing in the metaphoric mode (according to White's schema), Guha uses a romantic emplotment (as did Dinesh Sen) to describe the fall from grace of native culture under the pressure of British rule, and just as surely envisions its comic redemption from that fallen state—a movement traced at least in part by the Subaltern Studies emphasis on recuperating an Indian history. This movement is explicitly Hegelian, as Guha repeatedly asserts in his references to the tragic, immediate perspective of the bondsman set within the macrocosmically comic drama of self-consciousness it promotes. This fundamentally romantic emplotment is placed within a narrative argument that we have not yet had occasion to study in this survey, an argument I would term formist, as opposed to the more classically mechanist modes of the earlier Marxists. The formist mode, according to White, aims at "the identification of the unique characteristics of objects inhabiting the historical field. . . . The task of historical explanation is to dispel the apprehension of those similarities that appear to be shared by all objects."42 This is clearly in keeping with the motivation to restore historical specificity to the subaltern consciousness, and the meticulous correction of the errors

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of both nationalist and Cambridge School historians that native elites spoke for the nation. Finally, the important difference separating Guha's project from the nineteenth-century European discourses of a Michelet or Tocqueville (who in White's scheme would be the historical precursors to this narrative alignment of formist argument with romantic emplotment) is the strong ideological assertion of radicalism—the view that the goals of the reforming critique are imminent, as opposed to the anarchism of Michelet in which the fallen state of man is redeemed in a remote and inaccessible temporal dimension, or the liberalism of de Tocqueville which projected "a minimal but hopeful freedom for his heirs."43 The tropological figure of metaphor mediates between these seemingly incommensurable oppositions by asserting a figurative similarity between two objects, despite the obvious differences between them. Metaphor thus combines qualities of distinct objects without reducing or negating them. Guha implies that the standard forms of colonial historiography have tended to negate the specificity of the Indian reality or to reduce it to a mere epiphenomenon of English history. The synecdochic and metonymic modes of this type of history remain blind to their objects, instead producing selfreferential autobiographies of colonial or elite power. Instead, Guha would restore the Indian reality to the status of a discrete or autonomous object similar to but distinct from elite power, "intertwined" with it, as Gramsci said, but not smothered by it. Such a conception of the historical field has direct repercussions for the notion that British power was exercised as a hegemony, or rule by consent. The concept of hegemony, which has often been used to describe the durability of British power in India, is to Guha a deeply troubled one. It is not historically possible to locate any rule by consent in either the colonial or nationalist periods ("DWH," 229-32). Indian politics was instead, he argues, always a highly differentiated and fluid terrain in which control repeatedly broke down and had to be adjusted periodically, from place to place, more often by force than through agreement. Consent among the subject population to the intentions of government was never achieved on the order of the historic coming-to-consciousness of the European bour-

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geoisie. The use of the concept of hegemony in the Indian context is inappropriate because of the socioeconomic structure of colonialism, which itself caused the failure of British capital in India to aspire to "the ideal of capital's striving towards self-realization" ("DWH," 228), its "universalist tendency" of subjecting all "pre-capitalist relations in material and spiritual life sufficiently enough to enable the bourgeoisie to speak for all of that society as it had done in its historic incarnations in England in 1648 and in France in 1789" ("DWH," 228). Ironic in terms of British claims to have ruled the subcontinent by consent, it was probably largely due to British economic policy itself that capital never acquired the momentum that might have resulted in a hegemonic form of politics in the colony. Instead, planned underdevelopment, perpetuated through an asphyxiating system of land rents and forced deindustrialization, allowed India to maintain the unique mixture of pre-capitalist, proto-capitalist, and imperialist relations of production that effectively rendered the populace ungovernable from the point of view of liberal bourgeois politics. To invoke a distinction made by Benedict Anderson, the English government in India promoted a form of official nationalism through their history writing, a form of representation not duplicated but appropriated by the Indian nationalist elite. No compensatory popular nationalism emerged in India as it did from the combination of print capitalism, languages of power, and the imagined communities that demanded territorial sovereignty from the late seventeenth to late nineteenth centuries in Europe and the American colonies.44 Rather, what the British and later the nationalist elite achieved was a "dominance without hegemony." A properly Indian historiography is oudined in Guha's essay as a full-scale totalization of nineteenth-century social and political ideology, conceived as an "organic composition of power." The essay's most important moves are to (1) break up the myth of British hegemony over the social and political life of colonial India, and (2) restore the self-directedness of both collaboration and resistance among the natives by nominalizing their distinct idioms. To this end, Guha offers a schematic breakdown of the "General Configuration of Power." The relationship between the two terms "Dominance" and "Subordination" is

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"determined and indeed constituted by a pair of interacting elements—Dominance by Coercion and Persuasion, and Subordination by Collaboration and Resistance" ("DWH," 229). By interrogating the colonial system of power in this way, Guha finds that hegemony simply was not operative as "a condition of Dominance, such that. . . Persuasion outweigh[ed] Coercion" ("DWH," 231). Rather, for every term employed in the British vocabulary of persuasion, a native idiom existed that transported the intended meaning of the word and its associated concepts into a similar but crucially different semantic constellation. This two-paradigm model is fundamentally metaphoric. Thus, for the British notion of order, which evolved with "the dialectical shift as colonialism outgrew its predatory, mercantilist beginnings to graduate to a more systematic, imperial career" ("DWH," 234), the subject-population understood the indigenous concept of Danda, "an ensemble of power, authority and punishment" ("DWH," 238) it had inherited through the shastras from the Laws of Manu. British ideology met a ready-made native concept of "order" and obedience that allowed the subordinate population to understand and comply with government—to a degree. Similarly, the colonial idiom of improvement, which embodied the benign aspect of British stewardship, or persuasion—in Western-style education, patronage of the arts, missionary activity, Orientalist projects, paternalistic attitudes toward the peasantry, tenancy legislation, standardization of weights and measures, legal prohibition of "barbaric customs," and so on—was appropriated differentially by the native elite. When the concept of improvement was taken up in reformist projects, it was often referred to an ancient Indian correlate in the concept of dharma, "virtue, the moral duty." ". . . [I]t was to Dharma that the indigenous elite turned in order to justify and explain the initiatives by which they hoped to make their subordinates relate to them as non-antagonistically as possible" ("DWH," 244). In the notion of collaboration or obedience, a utilitarian principle by which it was maintained that the "subjects owed their loyalty to the government for the sake of their own happiness" ("DWH,"

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249), the traditional concept of Bhakti could be referred to. "All the collaborationist moments of subordination in our thinking and practice during the colonial period were linked by Bhakti to an inert mass of feudal culture which had been reproducing loyalism and depositing it in every kind of power relation for centuries before the British conquest" ("DWH," 257). Finally, resistance or rightful dissent was met by the native counterpart of dharmic protest. Rightful dissent had obviously enjoyed special prestige as one of the ideological triumphs of the bourgeois revolution, and was subsequently codified in theoretical statements on natural law and inalienable rights from Locke to the utilitarians. The concept of dharma differed fundamentally from that of the liberal notion of right, however, in that it included no semblance of a contract between the ruler and the ruled, and no notion of citizenship or individual right; the ruler himself was responsible for the protection of his subjects, and indeed, "the king's failure in his protective function amounts to the most serious violation of dharma, and leads to the destruction both of himself and his subjects" ("DWH," 268). No less an authority than the Mahabharata advises the latter to abandon a bad king "like a leaky boat on the sea" ("DWH," 268). Dharmic protest, though deriving from the precolonial past, erupted throughout the colonial period. Rightful dissent against British authority was tolerated and even encouraged by the government in many of the institutions that grew up to channel it—petitions, letters to government officials, angry editorials, and even the Indian National Congress, which after 1885 became the central organization for the expression of dissent within an officially approved form. But rightful dissent was evidently misplaced in a social context having no equivalent notion of right. "Dharmic Protest remained, therefore, as one of the most incalculable factors of politics under colonial rule" ("DWH," 269), inspiring fear even in native nationalist leaders, who treated with dread the prospect of things getting out of control. Its outbreak was particularly manifested in subaltern consciousness, where "the official mind went on, throughout the entire period, to misread and misrepresent" it ("DWH," 269). Nationalist leaders never "came to terms with subaltern resistance in

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its dharmic idiom. The volatility of the latter was something which no liberal-Hindu or liberal-nationalist formula could fully comprehend" ("DWH," 269). The mediation of native idioms did little to ensure direct communication, much less compliance, between colonial authority and the Indian masses. In this regard, Guha's conception of metaphor could be termed poststructuralist, in that it denies the formal adequacy between tenor and vehicle that is conveyed by more traditional accounts of the tropes. Rather, the non-fit between Indian concepts of government and the discourse of colonialism helped foster an immense domain of subordination without consent, "the co-existence of two paradigms as the determinant of political culture" ("DWH," 272, emphasis in original) characterizing the entire colonial period. The imperative to recover an "Indian historiography," then, entails raising and revealing the native "paradigm," which has perpetually lain unrecognized beneath a veneer of historiographical appropriations, whether by outright colonialists or by the well-intentioned heirs of colonialist thought. This assertion of the hidden existence of a plane of native discourse alongside the discourse of the colonizer is essentially metaphorical. It asserts that the ultimate value of the history of the colonized is fully equal to the history of the colonizer, that these two domains occupy an object-object relationship with no sense of inferiority or negation implied between them. Nor are they seen to share the same essence. The relationship between the two planes of discourse is therefore figurative, but not mimetic: one misrepresents the other, but without replacing it. The failure of colonial historiography has been its fundamental misrecognition of the distinct elements of native culture, representing the Other as simply a manifestation of itself. Ironically, the Indian paradigm then forms the Other of any imported historiographical elitism, colonialist or nationalist. Only through the radical assertion of the metaphoric value of native culture would it be possible to comprehensively explore the ironies that constituted the intellectual world of the bhadralok, to see the composition of colonial middle-class identity not as a mere repetition and derivation of the "world-historical" European bourgeoisie, but as its own distinct formation. Though Guha no-

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where explicitly states this, his argument implies that elite nationalism and its historiography are really the inscription of the Other of itself; wherever it writes itself it misrecognizes the Other it claims to represent. Where can we look for a historiographical recovery of this otherness? If not precisely in the "subaltern," then perhaps in the double consciousness of the colonial middle class itself.

6 Conclusion: Irony as Tragedy

T H I S BOOK CONCLUDES AS IT BEGAN, w i t h the reading o f a text.

I have argued throughout that Bengali cultural history needs to be read in a new way: neither as the teleological unfolding of an abstract civilizational parity with supposedly universal standards, nor as the proud narration of a courageous resistance to English rule. It is instead the appropriately troubled record of a troubled society, often turning around and around on itself in order to escape the schizophrenic mindset of colonial acculturation. Whereas Kumudnath Das exhibited this doubleness in his oscillations between the discourses of literature and history, Sudipta Kaviraj makes of doubleness an explicit and enabling condition, the correct theoretical answer to the experiential question of how colonial culture is lived.1 Where Ranajit Guha posited the existence of a subaltern antidote as the "outside" of colonial middle-class consciousness, Kaviraj takes us back inside the belly of the beast to seek those strategies that enabled the colonial middle class to survive. Like Guha, Kaviraj envisions these enabling strategies not as arising from development, as tactics that evolve, but as residing in a moment, as a structure of consciousness. The moment is 1875. The study opens with a defense of "humor" as the defining trait of this enabling strategy precisely because "nothing else in discourse is so completely free of the usual demands of linearity." This moment of subversive humor breaks free from the longer temporalities traced by most of the authors here, who, whether they write the history of Bengali literature tragically or comically, all implicitly trace a path of redemption from the cultural upheaval of colonization. Hu-

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mor's unique ability to allow for "play" imparts to it the potential to unseat certainty, defy common sense, and break with established conventions while evading the consequences of more serious forms of subversion: "Control over humour is an unanswerable weapon" ("BMNC" I, 1). However, in Kaviraj's account the moment was followed by a progressive narrowing of possibilities for literature and the play of laughter. This is a particularly poignant suggestion when compared to the fate of Bankimchandra's contemporary, Vidyasagar, and Ashok Sen's tragic narrative of the impossibility of his reforming work. If 1875 was "open" for Bankimchandra, why was it "closed" for Vidyasagar? Kaviraj's study of humor in Bankimchandra uses what White would call an ironic tropology to describe the historical impasse of middle-class consciousness. This study bears similarity to Sen's in its specific examination of the cultural contradictions of the bhadmlok, but does so from the other direction, from the point of view of an internally coherent literary universe that is then traced out contextually to its informing conditions in nineteenth-century colonial culture. In this focus on the literary act per se, Kaviraj's is by far the most linguistically detailed critique we have examined. He discusses Bankim's series of fictional essays known as Kamalakanta (1873-75),2 calling on literary critical concepts of satire, irony, textuality, and Bakhtinian laughter to identify what might be called a poetics of colonial consciousness. Kaviraj is surely a contextualist in his isolation of the middle-class impasse as the dominant structure of nineteenth-century cultural production, a structure whose trends influence the contradictory development of modern Bengali society as a whole. Like Sen, his discussion of humor uses what is essentially a tragic mode of emplotment to tell the story of the historical fate of this structure; unlike that of Vidyasagar, however, Bankimchandra's structure offers a Utopian moment of freedom from the constraints of colonial power, a moment that can be recouped for the critic.3 Whereas White's schema dictates a congruence between contextualist argument and satirical emplotment, leading to a liberal ideological implication, Kaviraj's contextualism seems to rely on tragic form to tell the tale of elite subalternity. Unlike Sen's mobilization of tragic

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form as an indictment of present-day circumstances (in the mechanist link between the similar class situations of both Vidyasagar and contemporary historians), Kaviraj posits a clear break between the "linearity" of nineteenth-century Bengali literature and the present, a rupture that situates the critic on the far side of a historical divide separating him from the tragic consequences of the colonial prison house. The oddity of this rupture is that it seems to situate Bankim, too, outside the conventions of his time, lodging him within the skeptical contemporaneity of the critic. This fundamentally ironic position toward the past, with its relativizing assertions of distance and mastery over the historical process, is not dissimilar to Guha's: it signals the attainment of a meta-position on the unfolding of history itself, one that allows the historian to choose sites of identification with certain countertraditions of the past that do not follow the logic of middle-class complicity. In nineteenth-century urban literature and iconography, the Bengali babu was a humorous figure satirized in coundess popular tracts. Sumanta Banerjee describes the character in Kaliprasanna Sinha's Hutom Pyancbar Naksha (1868) "carousing with his cronies in bordellos, now holding forth in broken English over drinks, now worshipping before the image of Durga and the next moment sneaking off to taste a dish of beef roast."4 But as Kaviraj points out, the babu had a tragic side as well. "[T]he acceptance of western liberalism drove the babu deeper into contradiction. The babu became a convert to liberalism, but forgot to ask for even elementary self government. He rejoicingly accepted the principles of liberty and equality, but omitted any questioning of the propriety of political subjection . . ." ("BMNC," I, 31). This "large collective self deception" of babu culture was "ironic" in the enabling sense, as White defines it, of "affirm[ing] tacitly the negative of what is on the literal level affirmed positively, or the reverse."5 According to Kaviraj, Kimrnlakanta perfecdy embodies the tragic irony endemic to the colonial middle class as its theoretical transparency, in a fiction that self-consciously measures its own internal contradictions. If the English-educated "elite" were collectively blind to the reality of their oppression, they nonetheless latendy expressed their class consciousness in a variety of

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forms; fiction is the most representative genre in which this oblique language can be read as negotiating the ambivalence through tropological subterfuge. While these ambivalences expressed themselves with particular poignancy in the political associations and reforming zeal of the late nineteenth century, the discourse of such patent selfdeception cannot always be taken literally, and is not always as blind as it seems. Kaviraj argues that the literature of the period, but none more so than Kamalakanta, ironically interrogates the ironic situation of the babu; literary language becomes a tool for exposing and subverting the contradictions of the European legacy, but in a language that understands itself to be contaminated by the process of modernization or Westernization. Kaviraj argues that Bankim initiates a "rupture" in the self-deception of babu culture and forms the beginnings of a self-consciousness toward the discourse of subalternity that makes irony, in White's terms, "metatropological" as the strategic misuse of figurative language. While the bhadralok certainly appropriated the forms and idioms of English ideology in their own cultural productions, Kaviraj recognizes, as did Guha, that significant areas of misprision or deviation were opened up by the transplantation of ideological messages into the colonial situation. Native appropriations of Western cultural paradigms were unstable, heterogenous, and volatile. As the babu began to outgrow the strangeness of his Western clothes in the decades after wide-scale implementation of English education, he learned to wear them with a new and peculiar sense of style. Kaviraj's comparison of European and Indian conceptions of madness and self-realization in Kamalakanta shows how Bankim negotiated a large margin of noncompliance between the two constructs, subverting Western rationality in favor of an "untidy, tortured, selfdoubting . . . critique" ("BMNC," I, 22). Similarly, Bankimchandra transformed the native tradition of ironic literature into "self or double irony," a structure that illustrated how the individual self and the civilization of colonial power were imbricated in a historically determined "irrational rationality" ("BMNC," II, 4) in which the use of positive speech, the discourse of rationality that belonged to the colonial power, actually denied autonomy to the subaltern elite and

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so had to be systematically broken in order to be remade as a vehicle of expression. Finally, Bankim attempts a "critique of colonial reason" through the use of travesty, "a popular urge to desecrate the high rituals of a constituted society which the critics are powerless to challenge or transform" ("BMNC," III, 69). If subalternity is a tragic fate, its tragedy is reclaimed as humor precisely through the exercise of self-deception, a verbal battle against the restraining codes of marginalization one knows in advance cannot be won. Kaviraj asks rhetorically, Does this sort of discourse when used in high literature indicate anything beyond an individual predicament... or are there perhaps signs in this discourse of a shared, collective difficulty? Are there some people, some class, some political group who must speak like this, in this manner of saying and not saying, hiding what they say, turning their whole discourse into an endless double entendre? It seems to me that this is the typical discourse of subalternity, of a subaltern group which feels the inevitability of criticism and the inevitability of its practical failure. Also quite typical of the subaltern is this tragic disingenuousness, of making criticism, and hiding it in the act. Subalternity is a tragic f a t e . . . . [Bankim's] thought moves from a tragic perception of the world to an ironical way of dealing with it. ("BMNC," I, 29)

Guha's "two paradigm" schema can be put to use here as an interpretive grid for a discussion of elite culture in the colonial period. Once again, the definition of subalternity is expanded to include the doubly articulated position of a subservient middle class. Subaltern, Kaviraj reminds us, does not refer only to the lowest strata of the social order; as in Gramsci's relational use of the term, it is a condition of the educated middle class as well ("BMNC," I, 29-30). As the distributor of English ideology within the colonial educational apparatus, yet one prohibited from enjoying the benefits of the liberal dispensation, the bhadralok found itself caught in a double bind that dictated the form its appropriations of European rationalism could take. This synchronic conception of the native "field," while akin to Guha's metaphorical raising of the subaltern discursive paradigm, is essentially different in its assertion that English ideological penetration was not met or equated with native correlates, but was rather unraveled by native discourse—at least in the highest attainments of lit-

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erature, or if that is too grand a statement, at least by Bankimchandra in 1875. Ironic self-criticism performed a deconstruction of the dominant codes of rationality through a kind of secret language which, while exposing itself to ridicule, also subverted the larger social context that had constructed the babu as a ridiculous figure. Kamalakanta marks the moment at which an independent Indian consciousness might have taken shape. In the discourse of literature, however, it did not. The subsequent development or "linearity" of history regressed from this subversive moment, retreating from the world to the home. Over time, the ironic paradigm is finally tragic in its implications. Kaviraj argues that Bankimchandra, especially in the Kamalakanta, represents a moment of rupture in the assimilation of ideology; both the babu culture that preceded him and the subsequent development of Bengali literature, especially the moment of Tagore, more adequately assimilated the structure of representations in "a narrowing of the world." "Later literature captures less and less of social space, and retreats gradually into the interior of interiors" ("BMNC," III, 62). Thus the moment of Bankim is the historical high point of native disidentification with the interpellative project of English ideology.6 Subsequent babu culture was later able to modernize itself to the point at which the hold of "tradition" grew weaker and finally residual; by a certain historical moment (1915?) the growing power of modern ideas began to assert its dominance, resulting in a new form of normativity as the social order became solidified. "In Bankim's time the shape of babu society was merely being formed; it was putting together its cultural furniture. Naturally, there was far greater catholicity in its literary tastes and repertoire.... In Bankim's time the search for norms was still open" ("BMNC," III, 62). So while Bankim's early writing can be taken as a radical overturning of the colonialist project through a corrosive irony and intentional misappropriation of the forms of expression, later writers were doomed to a tragic repetition of the "disingenuousness" in earlier babu culture that Bankim had fought so strenuously to denounce. Kaviraj's approach is semiotically more sophisticated than earlier forms of Bengali literary history as it cooly registers the complexity of ambivalent signification. Yet there remain in it traces of a teleo-

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logical argument and the projection of a kind of "golden age" in the moment of Bankimchandra. The emphasis on the tragic disingenuousness of high literature seems to place us within a restricted or elite concept of the function of literature, which here once again proves the complex durability of certain minds to transcend their age. Bankirn's literary humor is uniquely privileged to untie the Gordian knot of aesthetic ideology in its self-conscious, self-referential complexity; Kamalakcmta in its ahistorical irony attains a kind of universality by which the critic, like the great writer, unravels the mysteries of his age through the autotelic incantations of high art. Why cannot such truths be communicated, be followed, be mobilizing? What separates the literary démystification of Bankimchandra from the tragic activism of Vidyasagar? If the "truth" revealed by art be tragic, even in its temporary moments of insight, the ironic vision of time stands above that unhappy end to outlast destiny itself and rejoin with a neutral temporality that hovers stilly over the grim destruction it contemplates below. *

*

*

Bengali literature and Bengali cultural history have "progressed" beyond the limits described by this book. Unfortunately, the academic study of Bengali culture both in India and in the U.S. continues to rehearse many of the shopworn phrases interrogated here. The Bengali literary canon is still as exclusive as was its former object of emulation, the English literary canon, thirty years ago. No reliable conduit of Bengali literary translation into English yet exists; with a few exceptions, none of the canonical literary texts investigated here has been retranslated—or translated well—since the early years of this century. Western scholars who wish to study Bengal must rely on inadequate materials in English before they begin their immersion in Bengali language. As such, language training is a calculated risk; who would believe the claims of literary historians when the translated literature is so paltry? The Indian historians of literature and culture who came into contact with the English had no such option. Their interaction was

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pressured at every point by the context of colonial rule, which inevitably marked their expression at its most fundamental levels. Even before they had achieved fluency in English culture, that culture presented itself to them as the culture of reference for the entire world. What could one do but engage in the process by which one's local history could become world history, one's local community could become part of the larger world, and one's culture could learn to speak the universal languages of reason and enlightenment, of destiny and progress, that had evidently brought England to India's shores? The arrogance of English literary and cultural historiography, in its self-description as universal standard, provided a powerful and paradoxical impetus to meet, exceed, and ultimately contest it. Bengali historians performed each of these acts at diverse times and in many contexts, in no particular order, and often all at once. The contradictions were glaring: The social destruction brought on by economic misrule was accompanied, even furthered, by a colonizing of the mind that proclaimed this engagement an exceptional blessing. Bengal could become exceptional, England claimed, by becoming more like its rulers. It could achieve its true identity by abandoning its particularity. But neither English nor Indian cultures could allow such a homogenizing project to succeed fully. As Michael Speaks has conjured it, the differential impulse haunts the totalizing one as its ghostly alter-ego; or, in the more discreet tones of a Hayden White, every Bengali historian is a master.

Notes

Introduction: The Ruse of Progress 1. See Charles E. Trevelyan, On the Education of the People of India (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1838). 2. Fredric Jameson produces a similar historicization of a high structuralist methodology, with reference to White, in his foreword to Algirdas Julien Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings on Semiotic Theory, trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. vi-xxii. 3. Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre," trans. Avital Ronell, Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies 7 (1980), p. 203. 4. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 186. 5. Williams, p. 186. 6. "Minute on Indian Education," in T. B. Macaulay, Selected Writings, ed. John Clare and Thomas Pinney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 2497. H. H. Wilson, "Education of the Natives of India," The AsiaticJournal, n.s. 19, no. 73 (1836), pp. 12-13, my emphasis. 8. For more on the education debates and the function of literature in India, see my "Sexing the Pundits: Gender, Romance and Realism in the Cultural Politics of Colonial Bengal," in Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies, ed. Henry Schwarz and Richard Dienst (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 224-58. 9. Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historiography of India: A NineteenthCentury Agenda and Its Implications (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi and Co., 1988), p. 50. Further references given in the text by page number as IHI. 10. The relevant definition is given in Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, See the English translation by J. B. Baillie, ed. George Lichtheim (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), pp. 228-40. 11. For an account of the English educational system in colonial India from a literary point of view, see Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). The history of Indian literary responses to English education has yet to be written.

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12. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 13. The crucial introduction to the competing ideological positions in the India debate is still Eric Stokes's The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). 14. Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 42. For a more comprehensive study of Sanskrit historiography itself, see A. K. Warder, An Introduction to Indian Historiography (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1972). 15. G. N. Devy has advanced the fascinating thesis that the willful forgetting of the Sanskrit tradition was a self-conscious ruse devised by vernacular or bhasa writers in order to survive the cultural shocks of colonialism. See his After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian Literary Criticism (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1992). This thesis by no means discounts my own, namely that European acculturation became a priority only among a range of options; it does, however, grant somewhat more stability to Indian "tradition" than I am prepared to accord it in this context. Partha Chatterjee has produced the fullest account so far of the early Bengali historiographical tradition and its relation to Sanskrit in The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 76-115. 16. Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization: His Despatches and Other Writings on China, India, Mexico, the Middle East, and North Africa, ed. Shlomo Avineri (New York: Doubleday Books, 1969), p. 132. 17. Michael Sprinker, Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism (New York: Verso, 1987), p. 11. 18. Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, A Grammar of the Bengali Language (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1980), xxv. See my "Laissez-Faire Linguistics: Grammar and the Codes of Empire," Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (Spring 1997). 19. Halhed, p. xxv. 20. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127-86. 21. Macaulay, "Minute," p. 241; my emphasis. 22. Paul de Man, quoted in Sprinker, p. 11. 23. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard, in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), p. 381. 24. Macaulay is reported to have said, "There is no temptation of wealth or power, which could induce me to go through it [Oriental literature] again." Quoted in Theon Wilkinson, Two Monsoons (London: Duckworth, 1976).

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25. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 138-39. 26. See Sumit Sarkar, A Critique of Colonial India (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1985), pp. 18-36. 27. I have explored this link in "Sexing the Pundits," pp. 230-38. The crucial text for Mill's articulation between literature and hegemony is his two essays on Bentham and Coleridge, conveniendy collected by F. R. Leavis, Mill on Bentham and Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 28. See Bernard S. Cohn, "Representing Authority in Victorian India," in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 165-209. See also Francis G. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967). Chaman Nahal has played on this theme with some sophistication in Azadi (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1979), p. 31: "He had fallen in love with the new Viceroy the day he saw his picture in the newspaper. If the British were going to lose India, it was not because of Gandhi or the awakening of the masses; it was because of the tactical error they had made in sending out an ugly Viceroy in the crucial days of their Raj. This . . . was the root cause of the tide turning against them." 29. Paul de Man, quoted in Sprinker, p. 267. 30. The exemplary critique of Kant here is Jacques Derrida, "Economimesis," Diacritics 11 (June 1981), pp. 3-25. See also Ian Hunter, "Aesthetics and Cultural Studies," in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Roudedge, 1992), pp. 347-72. 31. Macaulay, p. 242. 32. Sukumar Sen, History of Bengali Literature (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, i960), p. 296. The volume is prefaced by a commendatory letter from then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. 33. Buddhadev Bose, An Acre of Green Grass (Calcutta: n.p., 1948; reprint, Calcutta: Papyrus, 1982), p. 70. 34. Ranajit Guha, "Dominance Without Hegemony and Its Historiography," in Subaltern Studies VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 240. 35. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 29. 36. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken Books, 1969), p. 256. 37. White, Metahistory, p. 29.

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38. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, p. 13. 39. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial Word: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986). 40. P. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. In a similar vein, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts," Representations 37 (Winter 1992), pp. 1-26; "The Difference-Deferral of (A) Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal," History Workshop Journal 36 (Autumn 1993), pp. 1-34.

41. Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilana Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (New York: Orbis Books, 1985), p. s42. Macaulay, "Minute on Indian Education," p. 249. 43. P. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, p. 6. Chapter 1. Liberal Nationalist Histories 1. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (1964), trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). 2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 9. 3. Romesh Chandra Dutt, The Cultural Heritage of Bengal, 3d ed. (Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1962). Subsequent references will be made to this edition, abbreviated as CH, by page number. 4. Leonard A. Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement, 1876-1940 (New Delhi: Manohar Book Service, 1979), p. 44. 5. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 188S-1947 (Madras: Macmillan India Ltd., 1983), pp. 80-81. 6. Jaroslav Prusek, Dictionary of Oriental Literatures, vol. 2, South and South-East Asia, ed. Dusan Zbavitel (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 69. 7. White, Metahistory, pp. 15-16. 8. For a dissenting view, see Ashok Sen, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and His Elusive Milestones (Calcutta: Riddhi-India, 1977), esp. pp. 131-43. 9. See Guha, Indian Historiography, and P. Chatterjee, "The Moment of Departure," chap. 3 in Nationalist Thought. 10. Gordon, p. 4511. Gordon, p. 55. 12. Dinesh Chandra Sen, History of the Bengali Language and Literature, 2d ed. (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1954). Further references to this text will be abbreviated as HBL and cited by page number. 13. Sushil Kumar De, Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century, 1800-

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182s (Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, 1919). A revised and expanded second edition was printed as Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century, I7S7i8s7, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Firma K. L. M., 1962). Further references to this text will be abbreviated as BLN and cited by page number. 14. White, Metahistory, p. 18. 15. Daly's "Note on the Growth of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal," 1911, evokes a general sense of the tension in the air. For a reprint and introduction, see First Rebels, ed. Sankar Ghose (Calcutta: Riddhi-India, 1981). 16. White, Metahistory, p. 30. 17. Sukumar Sen, History of Bengali Literature (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, i960), p. 296. 18. Buddhadev Bose, An Acre of Green Grass, p. 70.

Chapter 2. Radical Nationalist Histories 1. See Gordon, pp. 101-34; Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 123-25, 135-37-

2. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, p. 124. 3. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 124-25. 4. Aurobindo Ghose, Bankim Chandra Chatterji (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1954), pp. 26-27. The articles originally appeared in Indu Prakash (Bombay) from July 16 to August 27,1894. Further references by page number are given as BCC. 5. Bankimchandra Chatterjee, "Bengali Literature," Bankim rachanavali, vol. 3, ed. J. C. Bagal (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1969), p. 124. 6. On British censorship, see Gerald N. Barrier, Banned: Controversial Literature and Political Control in British India, 1907-1947 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974). 7. White, Metahistory, p. 16. 8. White, Metahistory, pp. 22-28. 9. For an interesting summary of this concept of time, see Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), esp. pp. 194-95,364-66. Halbfass especially notes the recurring predictions of the kaliyuga by other thinkers in terms of the presence of foreigners. 10. See my "Laissez-Faire Linguistics: Grammar and the Codes of Empire," Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (1997); Carol Breckenridge and Peter Van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).

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11. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Bantam Books, 1963). 12. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959), esp. pp. 186-206, and The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976); White, Metahistory, pp. 7-9. For an analysis of romance as the ur-narrative of political mobilization, see Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), esp. chap. 2. 13. I am tempted to read these statements as allegories, following Ranajit Guha's suggestion that native elites translated colonialist idioms into popular concepts. See "Dominance Without Hegemony and Its Historiography," esp. pp. 232-72. Thus Aurobindo's "Government" could be translated as raja and "good of the people" as dharma. Especially provocative in this sense is Guha's reference to the Mahabharata justifying dharmic protest: "the king's failure in his protective function amounts to the most serious violation of dharma," and in this situation his subjects should abandon him "like a leaky boat on the sea" (DWH, p. 168). Further references to DWH (which is discussed in detail in Chapter 5) are given in the text by page number. 14. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, p. 125. 15. Gordon, p. 128. 16. According to Dipali Ghosh's Translations of Bengali Works into English: A Bibliography (London: Mansell Publishing, 1986), p. 63, Aurobindo only completed a small section of the novel, which was finished by his brother, Barindra Kumar Ghose. Aurobindo's portion of the translation can be found in his Collected Works vol. 8 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1959). A very interesting later translation "and adaptation," entitled Dawn Over India, trans. Basanta Koomar Roy (New York: Devin-Adair, 1941; republished, with some additional materials, as Anandamath [New Delhi: Vision Books, 1992]) is dedicated to Aurobindo. 17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard, in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), p. 388. 18. Aurobindo Ghose, The Renaissance in India (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1951). Further references to RI will be given by page number. 19. Gordon, p. 128. 20. Quoted in Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 124-25.

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Chapter 3. Marxist/Materialist Histories 1. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, p. 247. 2. On the manufacturing of the English Gitanjali from a wide variety of Bengali originals, see Sisir Kumar Das, introduction to The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. Sisir Kumar Das, vol. 1 (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1994), pp. 9-34. Also see C. D. Narasimhaiah, "The Reputation of the English Gitanjali," in English and India, ed. M. Manuel and K. Ayyappa Paniker (Madras: Macmillan India Ltd., 1978), pp. 62-63. I a m grateful to Lisa Kern for pointing out this reference. 3. Karl Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach," in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C.Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 145. 4. Karl Marx, "The German Ideology: Part I," in Tucker, pp. 172-73. 5. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus in Tucker, p. 246. Michael Sprinker's Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism (New York: Verso, 1987) provides an excellent account of this central dilemma within the Marxist tradition. 6. MarcusF. Vrzndz,Radical Politics in West Bengal (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1971), esp. pp. 21-22; also see Gordon, pp. 135-60. 7. Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence, 1857-1947 (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 98. 8. R. C. Dutt, Economic History of India in the Victorian Age, vol. 2 (1904; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1970). 9. Sudhi Pradhan, ed., Marxist Cultural Movement in India, Chronicles and Documents (1936-194-7), 3 vols. (Calcutta: Mrs. Santi Pradhan, 1979). Documents from the first conference are reprinted in Volume I. Further references to MCMI are given in the text by author, article, volume, and page number. 10. Susobhan Sarkar, "Notes on the Bengal Renaissance," in On the Bengal Renaissance (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1985), pp. 13-68, quotation on p. 13. Further references to "NBR" are given in the text by page number. 11. Quoted in Debi Chatterjee, Marxist Thought in India (Calcutta: Chatterjee Publishers, 1985), p. 163. 12. Barun De, "Susobhan Chandra Sarkar," in Essays in Honour of Prof. S. C. Sarkar (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1976), p. xxi. 13. Sumit Sarkar cites the following figures for Communist Party enrollment during this period: 4,000 in 1942; 15,000 in May 1943; 53,000 in mid-1946; over 100,000 in February 1948 {Modern India, p. 413). It is evident that the Party was rapidly gaining popularity, but was not yet strong compared to the Congress. By the war's end it claimed itself the third largest political party in India.

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14. For a radical account of Gandhi's negative view of Western-style modernization, see P. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, chap. 4. 15. S. K. De, Bengali Literature, 2d. ed., pp. 500-551. De mentions Roy's "lucrative money-lending business," "Tantrik beliefs," and "Muhammedan mistress," among other unsavory details. Considerable reassessments of his economic and social thought can be found in Sumit Sarkar, "Rammohun Roy and the Break with the Past," in Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India, ed. V. C. Joshi (Delhi: Vikas, 1975), esp. Ashok Sen, "The Bengal Economy and Rammohun Roy," pp. 103-35. 16. S. K. De, 540 if. 17. Quoted in P. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, p. 82, n. 9. 18. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, p. 446. 19. Satyajit Dasgupta, a historian of the Communist Party's activities of this period, has graciously warned me of the danger of reconstructing the social or political context from a propaganda pamphlet. After I had written this essay, it came to my attention that Sumit Sarkar had made a similar observation about the realpolitik of the "Notes" as early as 1972, but was rather more sanguine about it: "this bid to link up with certain worthwhile elements of the nineteenth century cultural heritage surely had considerable immediate justification . . . the Communists were just breaking out of their isolation from the nationalist mainstream. . ." (A Critique of Colonial India [Calcutta: Papyrus, 1985], p. 15). Barun De's introduction to Essays in Honour of Prof. S. C. Sarkar, cited above, provides an excellent assessment of the social and political contexts in which "NBR" was written, and gives a measured opinion of the dissenting work that would be undertaken by Sarkar's former students. P. C. Joshi asserts that one of the CPI's most pressing tasks was to bring a wide range of potential sympathizers inside the party (Essays, p. 4). 20. Susobhan Sarkar, "Autobiography of an Unknown Indian," in On the Bengal Renaissance, p. 139. 21. Sumit Sarkar, A Critique of Colonial India, p. 15. See also P. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, pp. 22-28. 22. Susobhan Sarkar, "Conflict Within the Bengal Renaissance," in On the Bengal Renaissance, pp. 69-70. Further references to "CBR" are given in the text by page number. 23. J. C. Ghosh, History of Bengali Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1948). Further references to BL are given in the text by page number. 24. From the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Tucker, p. 4.

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Chapter 4. Transitions: Mediation and Irony 1. For a historical overview of the electoral situation, see Franda. Many studies of this period and its legacy are available. Opposing perspectives can be found in Sumanta Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1980), and Rabindra Ray, The Naxalites and Their Ideology (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988). Satyajit Ray's film Pratidwandi ("The Middleman") captures the urban ennui and impulsive radicalism quite well. 2. For example, Asit Kumar Bandyopadhyay, History of Modern Bengali Literature (Calcutta: Modern Book Agency, 1986). The educational apparatus in West Bengal is still severely stratified, with English medium schools catering to an anachronistic perception of English education as the highest intellectual attainment and to the practical fact that it is a ticket to employment. The Left-Front government's attempt to remove the English curriculum from Bengali medium schools in the 1970s met widespread popular protest. 3. See especially Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969); Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1977). 4. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974). 5. For classic examples, see Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967); Samir Amin, Imperialism and Unequal Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977); and Samir Amin, Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure, trans. Michael Wolfers (London: Zed Books, 1990). 6. For a sample of the results of the new economics, see Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib, eds. Cambridge Economic History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). An excellent summary is available in Amiya Kumar Bagchi, The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). As early as 1961, Ranajit Guha had described the discourse of early Company economic policy in A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement, 2d ed. (New Delhi: Orient Longman Ltd., 1982). As its subtide implies, this study of the ideology of the Settlement marks the beginning of historical accounts that interrelate economic and discursive elements. For the enduring social effects of the Settlement, see Partha Chatterjee's Bengal, 1920-47, Volume I: The Land Question (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi and Company, 1984). Especially interesting is the statement in the preface on the application of Althusserian theory to social science.

i8o

Notes to Chapter 4

7. Sumit Sarkar, "Rammohun Roy and the Break with the Past," in V. C. Joshi, ed., Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India (Delhi: Vikas, 1975). Partha Chatterjee discusses the significance of this publication in Nationalist Thought, pp. 23-24. 8. Sumit Sarkar, Critique of Colonial India, p. 1. 9. Barun De, "A Historiographical Critique of Renaissance Analogues for Nineteenth-Century India," in Perspectives in Social Sciences I: Historical Dimensions, ed. Barun De (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 178218. Further references to PSS are given in the text by page number. 10. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party" in Tucker, p. 478. 11. Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge, 1975). 12. Asok Sen, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and His Elusive Milestones (Calcutta: Riddhi-India, 1977), p. 143- Further references to ICV are given in the text by page number. 13. The Calcutta Gazette Supplement for 1879 shows the stunning success of Vidyasagar's publications: 50,000 copies of Akhyan Maujari were printed; 20,000 of Varna-parichaya (the 146th reprint came out in 1889); 10,000 of Vodhodaya; 3,000 of Sitar banabas (19th edition). By comparison, Bankimchandra's Durgeshnandini reached its 7th edition in the same year, printed in 1,500 copies. Of course this does not reflect the audience who found it serialized in Bangadarshan, but certainly does indicate Vidyasagar's relative popularity. 14. White, Metahistory, pp. 37-38. 15. White, Metahistory, p. 38. 16. J. H. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968); J. Gallagher, G. Johnson, and A. Seal, Locality, Province and Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973)17. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, esp. chap. 6. 18. Ranajit Guha, "Neel-darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt in a Liberal Mirror "Journal of Peasant Studies 2, no. 1 (October 1974), pp. 1-46. Further references to "ND" are given in the text by page number. The play itself is available in English, presumably translated by Michael Madhusudan Datta, Madhusudan racanavali, ed. Kestra Gupta (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1965), pp. 745-809. 19. Many of these documents, which include extensive selections from the trial, are available in Sudhi Pradhan and Sailesh Sen Gupta, eds., Nildarpan; or the Indigo Planting Mirror, trans. M. M. Datta, 3d ed. (Calcutta: Eastern Trading Company, 1958). 20. "By treating 'collective representations' as sign-systems, one might

Notes to Chapter 5

181

hope to go further than the pious show of unmasking them and account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature." Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 921. Barthes, Mythologies, p. 119. 22. Barthes, Mythologies, p. 124. 23. Barthes, Mythologies, p. 126 n.7. 24. Barthes makes an interesting point in this context about the identification that enables this transference. "The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself. In the petitbourgeois universe, all the experiences of confrontation are reverberating, any otherness is reduced to sameness. The spectacle or the tribunal, which are both places where the Other threatens to appear in full view, become mirrors. This is because the Other is a scandal which threatens his existence." Barthes, Mythologies, p. 151. 25. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1969). 26. Benoy K. Chowdhury, "Growth of Commercial Agriculture and Its Impact on the Peasant Economy," Indian Economic and Social History Review 7, no. 2 (June 1970), p. 229. 27. It is interesting to note that Guha's article appeared in an abbreviated version in Frontier, a weekly newspaper sympathetic to Naxalite causes. 28. For a brief but excellent assessment of the gains of the sixties and seventies, see Partha Chatterjee, introduction to Promode Sengupta, Naxalbari and Indian Revolution (Calcutta: Research India Publications, 1983), pp. i-vii.

Chapter s• Subaltern Studies: Radical History in the Metaphoric

Mode

1. Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, I-VI (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982-1990). Eight volumes have been published up to 1996; at least two more are in production. A compilation volume intended to popularize the group's work for the U.S. audience was brought out in 1988, with a foreword by Edward Said and an editor's note and introduction by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). I should note that it is not my intention to summarize or review the group's work here. Review articles include Javeed Alam, "Peasantry, Politics and Historiography: Critique of New Trend in Relation to Marxism,"

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Notes to Chapter 5

Social Scientist 117 (February 1983), pp. 43-54; Sangeeta Singh et al., "Subaltern Studies II: A Review Article," Social Scientist 137 (October 1984), pp. 3-41; Rosalind O'Hanlon, "Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia," Modern Asian Studies 22:1 (1988), pp. 189-224. Also see Gyan Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories in the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography," Comparative Studies in Society and History 32:2 (April 1990), pp. 383-408; "Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historigraphy," Social Text 31/32 (1992), pp. 8-19; "Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism," American Historical Review (December 1994), pp. 1475-90. Prakash has been challenged by Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook, "After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World," Comparative Studies in Society and History 34:1 (January 1992), pp. 141-67. His reply, "Can the Subaltern Ride? A Reply to O'Hanlon and Washbrook," appears in the same issue. 2. The formulation is Spivak's. See "Negotiating the Structures of Violence: A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak" in The Postcolonial Critic, ed. Sarah Harasym (London: Roudedge, 1990). 3. Ranajit Guha, "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India," in Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 4, emphasis in original. Further references to "OSA" are given in the text by page number. 4. Susobhan Sarkar's essay "The Thought of Gramsci" was published in 1968. Its first line reads "The name of Antonio Gramsci as a foremost Marxist leader reached our country barely a decade back." Towards Marx (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1983), p. 97. Louis Marks translated and edited The Modern Prince and Other Essays (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1957). 5. P. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, p. 37. 6. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 597. Gramsci, Selections, p. 90. 8. Gramsci, Selections, p. 52. 9. Gramsci, Selections, p. 55. 10. Guha, "Discipline and Mobilize," in Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 69-120. 11. Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 13. Further references to EAP are given by page number. 12. Gramsci, Selections, p. 333. 13. Gramsci, Selections, pp. 52, 54-55. 14. Ranajit Guha, "The Prose of Counter Insurgency," in Subaltern

Notes to Chapter 5

183

Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 1-42. Further references to " P C I " are given by page number. 15. See, for example, the work of the Institute for the Rewriting of Indian History, a neo-Vedic group that attempts to restore the primacy of Sanskrit learning and an undiluted allegiance to Hindu "scripture." 16. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 2. 17. P. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, pp. 162-64. 18. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 12. 19. Guha, "Chandra's Death," Subaltern Studies V, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 135-65. Further references to " C D " in the text are given by page number. 20. Sumit Sarkar, "The Conditions and Nature of Subaltern Militancy: Bengal from Swadeshi to Non-Co-operation, c. 1905-22," in Subaltern Studies III, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 273. Further references to " C N S " in the text are given by page number. 21. Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 278-94. 22. Spivak, "Editor's Note," Selected Subaltern Studies, p. xi. 23. For some of the promises and dilemmas of this form of history, see Gregor McLennan, Marxism and the Methodologies of History (New York: Verso, 1981), pp. 112-28. A recent essay of Sarkar's poses similar challenges to what he calls the "Saidian framework" of subsequent subaltern work. "Orientalism Revisited: Saidian Frameworks in the Writing of Modern Indian History," Oxford Literary Review 16, nos. 1 - 2 (1994), pp. 205-24. 24. Alam, "Peasantry," p. 47. 25. Gramsci, Selections, p. 75. 26. Guha, Elementary Aspects, pp. 278-332. 27. D. D. Kosambi, The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India in Historical Outline (New Delhi: Vikas, 1970). Also see Gramsci, Further Selectionsfrom the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Derek Boothman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 118-24. 28. For a broader discussion of Utopian thinking in India and the third world, see Ashis Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). Fredric Jameson has offered the most persuasive arguments for the "necessity" of Utopian thinking in general. See especially The Political Unconscious, pp. 281-300; Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 116-59; The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971-1986, vol. 2, The Syntax of History, pp. 75-102.

184

Notes to Conclusion

29. This assertion comes from a comparison of the contents of Subaltern Studies I ami VII. 30. Guha, epigraph to Elementary Aspects. 31. P. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, p. 13, my emphasis. 32. Ajit K. Chaudhury, "Discussion: In Search of a Subaltern Lenin," in Subaltern Studies V, ed. Ranajit Guha, p. 236. 33. Veena Das, "Subaltern as Perspective," in Subaltern Studies VI, ed. Ranajit Guha, pp. 310-24. 34. P. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, p. 13. 35. Das, "Subaltern as Perspective," p. 324. 36. Upendra Baxi has commented on this peripheralization of witnesses in " 'The State's Emissary': The Place of Law in Subaltern Studies," in Subaltern Studies VII, ed. Ranajit Guha, pp. 247-64. 37. J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), pp. 45562. 38. Guha, An Indian Historiography, p. 50, emphasis in original. 39. Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," in Subaltern Studies TV, pp. 341-42. 40. Spivak, "Subaltern Studies," p. 342. 41. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 293. 42. White, Metahistory, pp. 13-14. 43. White, Metahistory, p. 229. 44. Anderson, Imagined Communities, esp. pp. 83-111. One of the most convincing studies of the display of English official nationalism in India is Bernard S. Cohen, "Representing Authority in Victorian India," in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrance Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 165-209.

Chapter 6. Conclusion: Irony as Tragedy 1. Sudipto Kaviraj, "Bankimchandra and the Making of Nationalist Consciousness," 3 vols., in CSSSC Occasional Papers 108-110 (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, 1989). Further references to "BMNC" are given in the text by volume and page number. 2. An English translation is available in Kamalakanta: A Collection of Satirical Essays and Reflections, trans. Monish Ranjan Chatterjee (Calcutta: Rupa and Co., 1992). 3. "The Contextualist proceeds . . . to pick out the 'threads' that link the event to be explained to different areas of the context. The threads are identified and traced outward, into the circumambient natural and social

Notes to Conclusion

185

space within which the event occurred, and both backward in time, in order to determine the 'origins' of the event, and forward in time, in order to determine its 'impact' and 'influence' on subsequent events. This tracing operation ends at the point at which the 'threads' either disappear into the 'context' of some other 'event' or 'converge' to cause the occurrence of some new 'event.'" White, Metahistory, pp. 18-19. 4. Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1989), pp. 179-80. j. White, Metahistory, p. 37. 6. My choice of Althusserian terminology here is reinforced by Michel Pecheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology: Stating the Obvious, trans. Harbans Nagpal (London: Macmillan Press, 1982). For a brief summary of Pecheux's terms see Colin MacCabe, Tracking the Signifier: Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 111-12 n.13.

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Index

Althusser, Louis, 18,107-8 Anderson, Benedict, 33,157

Communist Party of India (MarxistLeninist), 106-7. See also Naxalites

babu, 164-68 Banerjee, Sumanta, 164 Barthes, Roland, 30,123-24,127 Bengali: Bible, 58; bourgeoisie, 13, 97104,112-27,128-61,162-68; language, 57-58, 63, 64, 68-69,116,125-26; literature, 50, 55, 64, 68-73, 94-104, 117,165-68; regionalism, 68, 85-91; renaissance, 22, 55, 56, 64, 72-73, 81, 84-94,102,108,111-14,129. See also Identity; Ideology; Subaltern Benjamin, Walter, 24,107 Bose, Buddhadev, 22, 61, 77 Buddha, Gautama, 146 Buddhist, 43

Das, Kumudnath, 29-39, 77 Das, Veena, 152 Datta, Michael Madhusudan, 10, 46-47, 83,100,101 Datta, Sudhindranath, 84 De, Barun, m - 1 4 De, Susil Kumar, 36, 48-57 de Man, Paul, 20 Derrida, Jacques, 7,141-42,154-55 Devy, G. N., 172 n.15 Dey, Bishnu, 83 Dutt, Romesh Chandra, 21, 39-49, 51, 56, 63, 77, 79, 80-81

Cambridge School historians, 120-21 capitalism, 1-2, 98-99,108-10,113,157 Carey, Reverend William, 57 Carlyle, Thomas, 29, 38-39 Chaitanya, 42 Chandidas, 42 Chandra, Bipan, 80 Chatterjee, Bankimchandra, 13, 46-47, 63-73, 83,101-2,162-67; Anandarnath, 70; Kamalakantet, 163-67 Chatterjee, Partha, 3, 25-28,130,140, 146-47,151 China, 106 Christian missionaries, 57-58 College of Fort William, 59 Communist Party of India (CPI), 76, 86 Communist Party of India (Marxist), 106

economics, 108-10 English East India Company, 11 education, English, in India, 9,11,13,19, 31-33,40, 57,118 Engels, Friedrich, H I , 113 Fanon, Frantz, 66 form: historiographical, 5-25,134; Indian epic, 10; literary, 8, 9; narrative, 16. See also Historiography, modes of Freud, Sigmund, 152-53 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 89-91,143 Ghose, Aurobindo, 13, 42, 62-75, 77, 79 Ghosh, J. C., 94-104 Goethe, Wolfgang von, 37-38 Gordon, Leonard, 47, 69 Gramsci, Antonio, 128,130-33,137, 144-45,149

198

Index

Guha, Ranajit, 2, 3 , 1 2 - 1 3 , 1 4 , 20, 22, 26, 122-27,128-61,164,166

Kaviraj, Sudipta, 162-68 Krittibas, 10

Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey, 17-18 Hegel, G. W. F., 12-13, 25, 52,139,146 hegemony, 156-58 historiography, modes of, 5-7, 23, 24, 28,108,119 argument: contextualist, 49-52,163; formist, 155; mechanist, 44, 65-66, 95-96,117; organicist, 43-44, 48 emplotment: romantic, 67-70, 74, 155; tragic, 44, 51-52,117,163,167; comic, 44; satirical, 52-53 ideological implication: conservative, 44, 97; liberal, 45-48, 56; radical, 52, 65-66, 74,118,156 trope: irony, 9 7 , 1 1 3 , 1 1 8 - 1 9 , 1 6 2 68; metaphor, 155-56, 158-60; metonymy, 96. See also Realism history: as concept, 8, 29, 34, 38; as discipline, 133-38,147-54

Lacan, Jacques, 140 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 125,140-42 Liberalism, European, 14, 24, 46-48, 52, 79 literary criticism, 15,134 literature, 8, 26, 29, 36-39, 56. See also Bengali literature; Ideology, aesthetic

identity: Bengali, 95-96; English, 9; Hindu, 66, 70-71,112; Indian, 66, 114-15; Muslim, 66, 91,112. See also Bengali ideology, English: aesthetic, 16-19, 26, 47, 55, 68-69,113-14, 123,127; appropriation of, 23,110,166-67; historiographical, 7-9, 41; Imperial, 13,17,19, 5 6 , 1 1 2 , 1 1 4 - 1 5 , 1 2 4 , 1 2 6 - 2 7 , 135,159; general, 12,18,108 Indian Independence, as concept, 105 Indian National Congress, 39,45, 47, 76, 98,159; Extremist faction, 62, 68-69, 89-90, 93-94 Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), 82-84 Italy, 131 Jameson, Fredric, 16,171 n.2,176 n.12, 183 n.28 Jayadeva, 41 Kampan, 10 Kant, Immanuel, 18-20, 69

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 11,18-20, 26 Marx, Karl, 1 , 1 2 , 43-44, 76-94, 95~96, i n , 113,145; Grundisse, 1, 78-79 Marxism, 76-94,105-27 Mill, James, 135 Mill, John Stuart, 11,19, 68 Mitra, Dinabandhu, 82-83,122-27 modernity, colonial, 25, 29, no, 120 Mukherjee, Meenakshi, 14 Nahal, Chaman, 173 n.28 nationalism, European, 25,156-57; Indian, 15, 32-75,143,146,156-57 Naxalites, 107,121,127 parity, battle for (Guha), 21, 26, 40, 41, 49, 63, 77 pluralism, 77 progress, as idea, 22-23, 40, 48, 92-94 Progressive Writer's Association (PWA), 82-84 realism: historiographical, 5, 7,14; literary, 127 Roy, Rammohun, 45, 59-60, 87, i n Sanskrit, 10,14, 41-42, 63-67 Sarkar, Sumit, 62, i n , 141-43 Sarkar, Susobhan, 84-94 Schiller, Friedrich, 19 Seal, Anil, 135 Sen, Ashok, 116-21,125-26,163-64 Sen, Dinesh Chandra, 36, 48-54, 57-60 Sen, Sukumar, 2, 21, 60 Soviet Union, 106

Index Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 154 Sprinker, Michael, 17 subaltern, 25,122,130-33,137-40, 145-46,166 Subaltern Studies, 25,129-61 Suleri, Sara, 14 Swadeshi, 32, 62

199

Valmiki, 10 Vidyapati, 42 Vidyasagar, Iswar Chandra, 45-46, 115-21,125-26,163

Tagore, Rabindranath, 31-38, 61, 83, 103-4,167 Tulsidas, 10

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 108-10 White, Hayden, 5 - 7 , 1 2 , 23, 24, 28, 49, 52,155, 163 Williams, Raymond, 8-10 Wilson, Horace Hayman, 11 world-systems theory, 108-10

universality, 37-39, 47, 77,168

yuga, 65-67