Back in 1835 a young student, Kylas Chunder Dutt, at Hindoo College published 'A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945' in The Calcutta Literary Gazette, or, Journal of Belles Lettres, Science, and the Arts.
It began as follows-
'The people of India and particularly those of the metropolis had been the subject for the last fifty years to every species of subaltern oppression.'
The word subaltern had a long history of being used to mean 'of inferior rank' but over the course of the Nineteenth Century it came to mean a second lieutenant in the Army. Churchill was a subaltern when he came to India. Indeed, many subalterns were from wealthy or aristocratic families. At that time, all Indians- no matter how senior in service- in the British Indian Army were 'non-commissioned officers' and thus junior to every 18 year old subaltern. That is the reason, the Gramscian use of the term (which he used as a code word for 'proletarian') sounds odd to Indian ears. It is a mark of the Eurocentrism and deracination of the Subaltern Studies group that they use the term in an obsolete sense.
In 'Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?' Dipesh Chakraborty makes an extraordinary claim
IT HAS RECENTLY BEEN SAID in praise of the postcolonial project of Subaltern Studies that it demonstrates, "perhaps for the first time since colonization," that "Indians are showing sustained signs of reappropriating the capacity to represent themselves [within the discipline of history]."'
Indian History was a compulsory subject for the B.A exam at Calcutta University since 1857. The best historians of India were Indian by the beginning of the Twentieth century. By about 1912, a separate History Department and a BA in History was offered. The MA in history was introduced in 1919. The Archaeological Survey of India, established in the 1860s, got its first Indian head in 1931. Most historians of India were Indian much before Independence. Some were of good families but none could be said to have belonged to the elite- i.e. the aristocracy or the purple of commerce.
Subaltern Studies was supposed to be a 'history from below' but it has no tangible achievements to point to. By contrast, there already were histories of the Trade Union movement and of the struggles of peasants and tribal populations just as there were histories of particular mercantile or other caste groups as well as chapters in books on economic history which traced the fortunes of particular occupations or industries.
As a historian who is a member of the Subaltern Studies collective, I find the congratulation contained in this remark gratifying but premature.
He would be equally gratified if someone said 'The Subaltern Studies collective represents the first time, since the Battle of Plassey, that Bengalis have been able to wipe their own bums. Previously, they had to get the Viceroy to do it.'
The purpose of this article is to problematize the idea of "Indians"
do guys who ran away from there and took British citizenship in 1959 count?
"representing themselves in history."
Sadly, historians aren't allowed to represent themselves in history. My biography of Alexander the Great was rejected because it consisted entirely of my recollections of my time at St. Columba's School. There was a boy in my class named Alexander. What was so fucking great about him? That's what I wanted to know.
Let us put aside for the moment the messy problems of identity inherent in a transnational enterprise such as Subaltern Studies, where passports and commitments blur the distinctions of ethnicity in a manner that some would regard as characteristically postmodern.
Modern people didn't have passports. Only post-modern peeps do.
I have a more perverse proposition to argue. It is that insofar as the academic discourse of history-that is, "history" as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university-is concerned, "Europe" remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call "Indian," "Chinese," "Kenyan," and so on.
This may be so if it is done in Europe by Europeans who insist that Genghis Khan was actually that Aunty of theirs who moved to Manchester. Sadly, she invaded China and killed a lot of people. Mancunians can be very violent you know. Mummy never invaded China. She would just order food from the Chinese takeaway any time she felt peckish.
There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called "the history of Europe."
There is no such 'master narrative' because the history of Europe is the history of conflict between ideologies and methodologies.
In this sense, "Indian" history itself is in a position of subalternity; one can only articulate subaltern subject positions in the name of this history.
In which case any Indian historian is ipso facto a Subaltern historian. But so are cats. This is because their articulation of master narratives consists of making miaow miaow noises. That is highly subaltern behaviour. Had Churchill persisted in making miaow miaow noises when he was a subaltern in the British Army in India, he wouldn't have been promoted.
While the rest of this article will elaborate on this proposition, let me enter a few qualifications. "Europe" and "India" are treated here as hyperreal terms in that they refer to certain figures of imagination whose geographical referents remain somewhat indeterminate.
In other words, they are like Churchill, the subaltern, whose incessant miaowing annoyed the fuck out of Lord Kitchener. Hyperreality is totes cool.
There are at least two everyday symptoms of the subalternity of non-Western, third-world histories. Third-world historians feel a need to refer to works in European history;
This may be true of some Professors who espouse a foreign ideology. But history books can be written by non-academics with expert knowledge of a particular field.
historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate.
They may have to refer to Islamic historians when writing about the Crusades or to Chimalpahin when writing about Imperial Spain's dependence on Mexican silver.
Whether it is an Edward Thompson,
son of a pal of Tagore's. He knew plenty about India and was a friend of some prominent Indian historians.
a Le Roy Ladurie,
another Communist. Why is Dipshit suggesting these guys were racist cunts? Was it because they were White?
a George Duby, a Carlo Ginzberg, a Lawrence Stone, a Robert Darnton, or a Natalie Davis-
why are all these people so fucking White? Why couldn't they at least paint black stripes on themselves? Would that really be too much to ask?
to take but a few names at random from our contemporary world- the "greats" and the models of the historian's enterprise are always at least culturally "European."
These guys aren't great.
"They" produce their work in relative ignorance of nonWestern histories,
Because historians tend to be stupid and ignorant. It isn't a high IQ profession.
and this does not seem to affect the quality of their work. This is a gesture, however, that "we" cannot return. We cannot even afford an equality or symmetry of ignorance at this level without taking the risk of appearing "old fashioned" or "outdated."
Also, the Subaltern historians are obliged to write in English. Guess who else speaks English? King fucking Charles! That shows that Dipshit is being sodomized by Viceroy Sahib but nobody notices.
The everyday paradox of third-world social science is that
only stupid peeps do it but they have to pretend they are smart.
we find these theories, in spite of their inherent ignorance of "us," eminently useful in understanding our societies.
These guys don't understand shit. Narendra Modi understands his society. That's why he is Prime Minister.
What allowed the modern European sages to develop such clairvoyance with regard to societies of which they were empirically ignorant?
They were stupid and published shite. It was the STEM subjects which burgeoned. But colour or gender are irrelevant in useful types of Research.
Why cannot we, once again, return the gaze?
We have. There are plenty of chauvinistic national or religious ideologies which contend that Whitey be debil or else that Europe has always been evil and sexually degenerate.
There is an answer to this question in the writings of philosophers who have read into European history an entelechy of universal reason,
this can be done for Islam or Hinduism or Confucianism. Incidentally, Christianity originated in an Asian country adjacent to Africa.
if we regard such philosophy as the self-consciousness of social science. Only "Europe," the argument would appear to be, is theoretically (i.e., at the level of the fundamental categories that shape historical thinking) knowable;
Nobody has ever made this claim.
all other histories are matters of empirical research that fleshes out a theoretical skeleton which is substantially "Europe."
All history is empirical. Theories of history are not themselves history.
There is one version of this argument in Edmund Husserl's Vienna lecture of 1935, where he proposed that the fundamental difference between "oriental philosophies" (more specifically, Indian and Chinese) and "Greek-European science" (or as he added, "universally speaking: philosophy") was the capacity of the latter to produce "absolute theoretical insights," that is "theoria" (universal science), while the former retained a "practical-universal," and hence "mythical-religious," character.
Sadly, there was no 'universal science', no 'absolute proofs', no transcendental ego and no 'eidetic objects'. Husserl had been barking up a tree that didn't exist.
This "practical-universal" philosophy was directed to the world in a "naive" and "straightforward" manner, while the world presented itself as a "thematic" to theoria, making possible a praxis "whose aim is to elevate mankind through universal scientific reason."
There was no 'universal scientific reason' because there was no 'theory of everything' and no 'mathesis universalis which could algorithmically generate every true proposition.
A rather similar epistemological proposition underlies Marx's use of categories like "bourgeois" and "prebourgeois" or "capital" and "precapital."
No. Marx made the claim that there were laws of economics which enabled him to predict the eventual course of history. He was wrong.
The prefix pre here signifies a relationship that is both chronological and theoretical.
It is teleological.
The coming of the bourgeois or capitalist society, Marx argues in the Grundrisse and elsewhere, gives rise for the first time to a history that can be apprehended through a philosophical and universal category, "capital." History becomes, for the first time, theoretically knowable.
The future becomes predictable. Did you know that 'cat' is a universal category? It allows me to predict that I will turn into Beyonce next Tuesday. Why else would cat's say 'miaow'?
All past histories are now to be known (theoretically, that is) from the vantage point of this category, that is in terms of their differences from it. Things reveal their categorical essence only when they reach their fullest development, or as Marx put it in that famous aphorism of the Grundrisse: "Human anatomy contains the key to the anatomy of the ape."
Marx was wrong. Apes and humans have a common ancestor- but so do bees and bears. Marx said 'The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known.
Human beings are still evolving. We can understand our own anatomy well enough without having a clue what our distant descendants would look like.
The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc.
This simply isn't true. A guy who understood how the Bank of England worked gained no insight into the society which built Stonehenge.
But not at all in the manner of those economists who smudge over all historical differences and see bourgeois relations in all forms of society. One can understand tribute, tithe, etc., if one is acquainted with ground rent.
No. Tithing, nowadays, means giving a portion of your net income to your Church. It has nothing to do with ground rent. Incidentally, all land in Scotland is now 'alloidal'. Ground rent has gone. But this hasn't changed anything very much.
The category "capital," as I have discussed elsewhere, contains within itself the legal subject of Enlightenment thought.
This simply isn't true. Capital exists in Theocracies. It had no legal personality in the Europe of the Enlightenment age. There is no 'in rem' action against Capital as opposed to specific objects.
Not surprisingly, Marx said in that very Hegelian first chapter of Capital, vol. 1, that the secret of "capital," the category, "cannot be deciphered until the notion of human equality has acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice."
We have that notion. But no secret of 'capital' has been revealed. That's why very few of us can get rich as day traders.
To continue with Marx's words: Even the most abstract categories, despite their validity-
If Mathematical Category theory knows of no universally valid category, how can any more empirical discourse have such a thing?
precisely because of their abstractness-for all epochs, are nevertheless . .. themselves ... a product of historical relations.
Lots of things aren't the product of 'historical relations'. They represent exogenous shocks- e.g. an asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out a lot of species.
Bourgeois society
in England which had had an industrial revolution
is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production.
It was much simpler than the system the Chinese had.
The categories which express its relations,
are merely guesswork. Marx guessed wrong because he was shit at Econ and shit at Law and shit at Political Science.
the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allow insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc.
Also, we will gain super-powers. This will cause us to bite radio-active spiders which will turn into subaltern cats like Winston Churchill.
... The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species ... can be understood only after the higher development is already known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient.'
Moreover, my study of the bourgeois economy- which is based on subalterns saying miaow- supplies the key to my becoming Beyonce next Tuesday.
For "capital" or "bourgeois," I submit, read "Europe."
Why make such a foolish submission? The fact is a large portion of Europe was Communist for four decades. England and France had some importance for Social Science. America had much more. But most parts of Europe were deeply provincial and of no great interest to the rest of the world.
Neither Marx nor Husserl spoke-not at least in the words quoted above-in a historicist spirit.
Nonsense! What can be more historicist, not to say chauvinist, than saying 'us guys, for historical reasons, are super special. All other nations must pay attention to us because we hold the key to the future?' Even if such a statement were made, it would only have some credibility if it was made about America, not Europe.
In parenthesis, we should also recall here that Marx's vision of emancipation entailed a journey beyond the rule of capital,
he thought scarcity could be abolished. People would only work if they wanted to.
in fact beyond the notion of juridical equality that liberalism holds so sacred. The maxim "From each according to his ability to each according to his need"
Marx said this could only happen after scarcity was abolished. Till then we must insist on 'to each according to his contribution'.
runs quite contrary to the principle of "Equal pay for equal work,"
That was the slogan of the Women's movement. Economists recognize that if women or darkies are paid less, then there is an employer's cartel or a labour monopsonist. This may be per se illegal. What is certain is that it leads to allocative inefficiency.
and this is why Marx remains-the Berlin Wall notwithstanding (or not standing!)-a relevant and fundamental critic of both capitalism and liberalism and thus central to any postcolonial, postmodern project of writing history.
But doing so in a nice Capitalist country run by White peeps.
With the establishment of British power, the Indian was to be made a legal subject,
He already was a legal subject of an Indian Sovereign or the 'Nizam' or Governor he designated. The British took over the 'Nizamat'- i.e. administration- at which point British Courts gained jurisdiction over Indians.
ruled by a government open to the pressures of private property
This had already occurred. Plenty of courtiers or even clerical workers had gained first the Diwani (right to collect tax a portion of which they remitted to the Emperor) and then the Nizami (power of administration) over bigger and bigger tracts of land. Private property existed, Tax was collected on realty and there were various cesses exacted by tax-farmers.
("the foundation of public prosperity," said Dow) and public opinion, and supervised by a judiciary where "the distributers of justice ought to be independent of everything but law [as] otherwise the officer [the judge] becomes a tool of oppression in the hands of despotism" .
In other words, judges in British India weren't allowed to sell their judgments to the highest bidder. The Law is a service industry. British courts attracted paying customers.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, generations of elite Indian nationalists found their subject positions, as nationalists, within this transition narrative
No. The nationalists only came into existence after the transition to direct British rule.
that, at various times and depending on one's ideology, hung the tapestry of "Indian history" between the two poles of the homologous sets of oppositions, despotic/constitutional, medieval/modern, feudal/capitalist.
Nobody gave a fuck what some stupid historian wrote.
Within this narrative shared between imperialist and nationalist imaginations, the "Indian" was always a figure of lack.
Both were pretending that the Brits had all the power and the Indians were utterly shit. The truth was that the Government had to accommodate various interest groups. The Empire had to at least break even.
There was always, in other words, room in this story for characters who embodied, on behalf of the native, the theme of "inadequacy" or "failure." Dow's recommendation of a "rule of law" for Bengal/India came with the paradoxical assurance (to the British) that there was no danger of such a rule "infusing" in the natives "a spirit of freedom":
In other words, you don't need to fear an Indian George Washington.
To make the natives of the fertile soil of Bengal free, is beyond the power of political arrangement .... Their religion, their institutions, their manners, the very disposition of their minds, form them for passive obedience. To give them property would only bind them with stronger ties to our interests, and make them our subjects; or if the British nation prefers the name-more our slaves.
We can sell them and make a lot of money.
We do not need to be reminded that this would remain the cornerstone of imperial ideology for many years to come- subjecthood but not citizenship,
Everybody in England was a subject, not a citizen, till 1948. But it was Stalin and Mao who enslaved their populations.
as the native was never adequate to the latter-
the 'native' could get elected to the British Parliament. One such was a Communist.
and would eventually become a strand of liberal theory itself.
Coz Liberalism is all about enslaving peeps or sending them to the Gulag. Gladstone was notorious for sodomizing Disraeli in black-face while singing 'the Camptown Races'.
This was of course where nationalists differed. For Rammohun Roy
not a nationalist. He lobbied Westminster to lift all restrictions of White emigration to India. This would keep the Hindu safe from the Muslim.
as for Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay,
who worked for the British. He too thought the Hindus needed protection from the Muslim. In East Bengal, that was certainly true.
two of India's most prominent nationalist intellectuals of the nineteenth century,
Roy got rich as a comprador. Bankim got a nice pension from the Brits whom he faithfully served.
British rule was a necessary period of tutelage
Fuck tutelage. The Bengali Hindu wanted to be protected from the Muslim or the Maratha or his cousin who coveted his property.
that Indians had to undergo in order to prepare precisely for what the British denied but extolled as the end of all history: citizenship and the nation state.
For the East Bengali Hindu this having to run the fuck away.
Years later, in 1951, an "unknown" Indian
from East Bengal
who successfully sold his "obscurity"
his autobiography was a riposte to Nehru's
dedicated the story of his life thus: To the memory of the British Empire in India Which conferred subjecthood on us But withheld citizenship;
Nope. It conferred first Provincial Autonomy and then complete Independence.
To which yet Everyone of us threw out the challenge "Civis Britanicus Sum"
Indians in directly ruled areas were British subjects just as much as any Englishman or Australian. Niradh, with typical stupidity, is alluding to a Roman Governor who had extorted money from a Province. No British Viceroy did any such thing. In any case, Lord Palmerston had clarified, in the Don Pacifico affair, that the British Government would protect any British subject regardless of colour or creed.
Because All that was good and living Within us Was made, shaped, and quickened By the same British Rule.'
That may have been true of Nehru. Perhaps, that was the reason he became 'the last Englishman to rule India'. Still, the fact remains, though all that is good within us was shaped by Mummy and Daddy we have to move out of their basement sometime.
In nationalist versions of this narrative, as Partha Chatterjee has shown, it was the peasants and the workers, the subaltern classes, who were given to bear the cross of "inadequacy," for, according to this version, it was they who needed to be educated out of their ignorance, parochialism, or, depending on your preference, false consciousness.'
Nonsense! In the nationalist narrative the peasants and workers were being looted and drained off their precious bodily essence through aggravated acts of fellatio and cunnilingus perpetrated on them by evil Viceroy Sahib.
On the other hand, it is true that only uneducated people need to be educated. You don't need to give Terence Tao lessons in basic numeracy.
Even today the Anglo-Indian word communalism refers to those who allegedly fail to measure up to the "secular" ideals of citizenship.
It refers to Muslims who run amok killing kaffirs.
That British rule put in place the practices, institutions, and discourse of bourgeois individualism in the Indian soil is undeniable.
It is nonsense. Those parts of India where there was already a middle stratum of 'banias' (business-man) class developed in the same manner as England. Those which didn't, didn't. There was also a bildungsburgertum which assimilated aspects of Western paideia in some but not all parts of India. This was also the case in Princely states or territories governed by Portugal or France. At one time, 'soft subjects' like Literature and History were thought to be part and parcel of this paideia. Then they became adversely selective and shat the bed. Dipshit has an MBA. But he is too stupid to make money in the private sector. Thus, he pretended to be some sort of Leftist with connections to Maoist guerrillas back home. I, on the other hand, though equally stupid, genuinely was a member of her Majesty's Secret Service with a license to kill. I was also married to Mary Poppins. But that is a story for another day.
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