Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Public Worlds) by Arjun Appadurai

Author:Arjun Appadurai [Appadurai, Arjun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Minnesota - A
Published: 2011-01-28T08:00:00+00:00

6

Number in the Colonial Imagination

In the latter part of 1990, in the last months of the regime of V. P. Singh, and in the turbulent transition to the rule of the country by S. Chandrasekhar, India (especially the Hindi-speaking North) was rocked by two major social explosions. The first, associated with the Mandal Commission Report, pitted members of different castes against each other in a manner that many feared would destroy the polity. The second, associated with the holy city of Ayodhya, pitted Hindus and Muslims against each other over the control of a sacred site. These crosscutting issues, whose interrelationship has been noted and analyzed a great deal in recent months, both involved questions of entitlement (what are your rights?) and classification (what group do you belong to and where does it fit in the political landscape?). This chapter explores the colonial roots of one dimension of the volatile politics of community and classification in contemporary India. In so doing, it follows the lead of many recent authors who have traced caste and communitarian politics to the politics of group representation in the twentieth century (Kothari 1989a, 1989b; Shah 1989) as well as to the role of the colonial census (Thapar 1989). But the precise and distinctive links between enumeration and classification in colonial India have not been specified, and that is what I propose to do in this chapter.

Edward Said’s famous book (1978) is centrally concerned with the forms of knowledge that constitute what he defined as orientalism, but he does not specify how exactly the orientalist knowledge project and the colonial project of domination and extraction were connected. Nevertheless, in two ways he does set the stage for the argument of this chapter. Discussing the various ways the discourse of orientalism created a vista of exoticism, strangeness, and difference, he says that “rhetorically speaking, orientalism is absolutely anatomical and enumerative; to use its vocabulary is to engage in the particularizing and dividing of things Oriental into manageable parts” (1978, 72; emphasis mine). A little later in the book he suggests that in exhuming dead Oriental languages, orientalists were involved in a process in which “reconstructive precision, science, even imagination could prepare the way for what armies, administrations, and bureaucracies would later do on the ground, in the Orient ʺ (123; emphasis mine).

In this chapter I want to show that the exercise of bureaucratic power itself involved the colonial imagination and that in this imagination number played a crucial role. My general argument is that exoticization and enumeration were complicated strands of a single colonial project and that in their interaction lies a crucial part of the explanation of group violence and communal terror in contemporary India. In making this argument, it might be noted that I build on David Ludden’s concern with “orientalist empiricism” (1993).

My central question is simple. Is there any special force to the systematic counting of bodies under colonial states in India, Africa, and Southeast Asia, or is it simply a logical extension of

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