Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (Mappings Series) by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

Post-Nationalist Foundational Histories

It is a tribute to the resilience of the modernizing project inaugurated by Orientalism that the legitimacy of its proponents was challenged before its hegemony was threatened. Thus, nationalism accused colonialism of deliberately failing to live up to its own promise; and Marxists, in turn, viewed both colonialism and nationalism as structurally incapable of fulfilling the tasks of modernization in the colonies. In Marxist analysis, the notion of India as an undivided subject, separated and observable in relation to an equally undivided Europe, was suspect because it denied the class relations underlying these entities. These class relations led to an unequal and uneven development that neither colonial rulers nor their nationalist successors could overcome; so, the Marxists regarded the nationalist representation of India as an undivided and autonomous subject as ideological. A somewhat similar critique has been developed by social historians oriented towards world history. In their accounts, India is released from the restricting lens of national history and is placed in the larger focus of world history. Although the emergence of a professional Marxist historiography of India preceded the rise of world-history analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s by roughly two decades, the two can be treated together because both interpret India in terms of a world-historical transition, despite the many differences between them. With their shared emphasis on political economy, they hold questions of production systems and political control to be of paramount importance in specifying the ‘third worldness’ of India.

In the Marxist case, the issues relating to political economy were, above all, expressed by social classes. The consequent advocacy of class histories – often contesting Marx’s writings on India – cracked the image of an undivided India. While other scholars approached India from the institutional context of an academic discipline, Marxists adopted the perspective of engaged critics, which enabled them to adopt a combative stance vis-à-vis the disciplines of Indology and South Asia area studies. Convinced that non-class histories suppress the history of the oppressed and stress consensus over conflict, Marxists wrote contestatory histories of domination, rebellions and movements,24 in which they accused others of biases and claimed that their own biases were true to the ‘real’ world of class and mode of production. In place of the notion of a homogeneous Indie civilization, the Marxists highlighted heterogeneity, change and resistance.25 The postcolonial Marxist historiography, in particular, replaced the undivided India of the nationalists with one divided by classes and class conflict; but because its enquiries were framed by a narrative about the transition of the mode of production, this scholarship viewed the activities of classes within the context of India’s passage to capitalism (or, more accurately, to an aborted capitalist modernization). Take, for example, the Marxist readings of the so-called ‘Bengal renaissance’ during the first half of the nineteenth century, when brilliant Bengali reformers had defied conventions and produced new visions of Hinduism. Long heralded as the beginning of a new India (with one of the earlist reformers, Rammohan Roy, called ‘the father of modern India’), Marxist reinterpretations stressed the failure of this project.

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